Future of Sustainable Smart Cities: User Experience and Policy Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,                              

The smart city ecosystem promises an empowered, enjoyable, accurate, immediate, and seamless experience for the users (Correa & Gosling, 2020). The system relies on a blend of smart devices, smart infrastructure, applications, and data science to communicate, analyze, and present outputs useful to the users (Gretzel et al., 2015). The concept of a smart city was built on the dream to see an improved integration between the city and its population using technologies (Pinochet et al., 2019). Consequently, the improved integration would help deal with social, economic, and environmental challenges many locations are facing (Townsend, 2014). Ultimately, a smart city would improve the quality of life of its residents, and more importantly, a smart city can lead to a more sustainable city (Gretzel et al., 2015).

Tremendous advancements have been made especially from the smart devices and smart technologies side, however, a smart ecosystem also requires efforts from the public policy standpoint as well as users’ adoption of smart devices and their willingness to share data (Angelidou, 2014; Femenia-Serra et al., 2019). While a plethora of studies have discussed the smart city concepts, its benefits and challenges, and the technologies and services that made up a smart ecosystem, a relatively limited amount of studies have looked into smart cities and smart technologies from the users and public policymakers’ perspectives.

This Special Issue in the journal Sustainability welcomes research focusing on user’s characteristics, utilization, and perceptions of smart technologies in a smart city context. Similarly, research related to the policies, governance, regulations, and implementation of smart ecosystems are encouraged to submit to this Special Issue. The scope of this issue also covers smart tourism and smart tourists, as well as both urban and rural destinations.

Dr. Kiattipoom Kiatkawsin
Guest Editor

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