Urban Analytics and Creation of Services for Sustainable Cities

The increasing number of people living in cities is placing a large amount of pressure on municipality authorities, when it comes to the management of several city dimensions. For instance, the most recent operators that provide micro mobility services (i.e. bicycles and scooters) introduced new management challenges in cities as nowadays micro mobility is changing how citizens commute in cities. Moreover, there is an urgent need to organize public spaces, in order to guarantee citizens’ safety and regulate the services provided by the micro mobility operators. Solid waste production and collection is nowadays a huge challenge for the municipalities. Indeed, waste collection costs range between 40 to 60% of waste management costs and are responsible for the production of 4.2 to 12 kg of CO2 per ton of waste. In this sense, there is the need to better understand waste production profiles in cities and how they vary in time and space. As populations that live, work and visit cities are increasing, parking capability is put under pressure, namely due to unattractive or insufficient public transportation, inadequate drivers’ education, and insufficient regulation. In this context, there is a need to understand the patterns and anticipate possible situations of illegal parking. Municipality decision-makers are also concerned about the increase or lack of information regarding atmospheric and liquid pollution. Indeed, there is insufficient information about the propagation of liquid and atmospheric pollutants in a way that civil protection and sanitation services could understand pollutants propagation and optimize their services in case of environmental accidents. Therefore, modelling atmospheric and liquid pollutants propagation in the city is urgent, to assess pollution impacts in the city environment. In addition, cities are also under pressure when big events happen in cities, such as the organization of marathons; these present a huge challenge to city managers and decision-makers regarding the operational aspects of public transportation demands. Assessing the impacts of crowds in the transport system and understanding how municipalities and transport companies can optimize their resources to face the increase of population during the realization of marathons assumes extreme importance in current environments. 

In recent years, municipalities have been collecting large amounts of data in several domains of the city, which can be used to improve operational city services, as well as providing new and improved services to citizens. In this sense, there is the need to develop new data-driven methods based on machine learning and artificial intelligence that take advantage of the data acquired, in order to describe and predict the spatial and temporal relations of disparate domains of the city using contextual information (e.g. climate, traffic, schools, events, restaurants, local accommodation).

The hereby presented Special Issue invites papers and reviews that address some of the most important sustainability challenges in city domains like:1) micromobility; 2) waste management; 3) parking; 4) pollution; and 5) crowd management to support decision-making at municipal level, to cope with city sustainability challenges due to population explosion and the consequent increase of urbanization. Papers which integrate the city domains with contextual information along with predictive techniques are encouraged. Case studies developed in cities using modern analytical spatio-temporal techniques and new methodological approaches that contribute to the study of the above-mentioned city domains, will also be considered.

Prof. Dr. Miguel de Castro Neto
Prof. Dr. Joel Dinis Baptista Ferreira da Silva
Dr. Pedro Alexandre Reis Sarmento
Guest Editors

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. Sustainability 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 2400 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.

• Smart cities
• Data analytics
• Micromobility
• Waste management
• Parking
• Pollution
• Crowd management