Big Data Analytics for Urban Planning

Dear Colleagues,

Big data has enriched our experiences of how cities function and is offering many new opportunities for social interaction and more informed decision-making with respect to our knowledge of how best to interact in cities. Undoubtedly, cities play vital roles in social development, as centers of production, living, culture, and communication. Especially, a city is a basic administrative management unit, and its healthy development is of significance for regional, national, and even global security. Due to the rapid progress of information and communications technology, the emergence of open and new data available from various sources has also presented significant opportunities for urban research and policy-making. Rigorous analysis of such data depicting complex socioeconomic dynamics is likely to open up a rich context for advancing urban science and policy interventions. Alongside this subtle but significant shift in the way data is used, there has been a transformation in the way services are conceived, commissioned, organized, delivered, and governed, with far greater involvement of the private sector and greater use of commercial data practices. This Special Issue will highlight the challenges, opportunities, and solutions of a synthesized urban planning framework based on ever-increasing amounts of large-scale diverse data and computing power. Smart city practice leads to bigger data and urban planning challenges/opportunities in the automated city future. This new perspective might change what we plan and the way we might plan the city. Methods developed in the mainstream urban disciplines have gradually recognized the challenges posed by big data and computing constraints. Therefore, much effort should be devoted to identifying urban planning applications of massive impact, of fundamental importance, and requiring the latest computing paradigm, and interdisciplinary approaches. Hence, more studies will eventually pave the way for the systematic implementation of new technologies in the computational urban sciences. Papers in this Special Issue are expected to advance theories, methods, or applications that improve the integration of big data and urban planning.

Dr. Anand Paul
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Smart Cities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Urban planning
• Intelligent transportation system
• Intelligent/smart building
• Big data
• Smart cities
• Machine learning/AI