IHOPE and the SDGs: Sustainable cities & communities

Smart cities are often discussed as one of the options for how we may live our lives in a future, sustainable society. But what does higher interconnectivity, dependence on technology, and overall increasing complexity actually mean for urban systems? There is remarkable uncertainty about what type of society will be the result.

Stephan Barthel of IHOPE, along with Johan and Magnus Colding, uses historical insights to pose these and several other critical questions, and possible answers about the future of smart cities, in their SAGE Journal commentary The smart city model: A new panacea for urban sustainability or unmanageable complexity?

The text can be read for free by following the link below, and will hopefully bring much needed attention to this important topic: https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808318763164

In this post series, IHOPE and the SDGs, we introduce you to previously published research from the IHOPE network connected to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The relevance of the research was identified by the OSDG artificial intelligence software, and is subsequently manually reviewed.