The social sustainability of smart cities: A conceptual framework

Abstract

The smart city concept has emerged as an attractive label to address pressing issues of global urbanization and combat the critical challenges to attain sustainable development. Sustainability is still often conceived through a green environmental lens, but any change in the built environment also has implications for the social environment. Social sustainability is a dynamic concept that combines design of the physical realm with design of the social world and promotes infrastructure to support social needs and concerns. While smart cities primarily aim at enhancing performance through innovative use of digital data and technology, a social sustainability perspective stresses the critical interconnections between people and place. Through a critical systematic literature review, this paper establishes a dialogue between the smart city and social sustainability. It evaluates the smart city concept through a social sustainability lens within a built environment paradigm. A multi-stage conceptual framework is advanced around notions of place, identification of core social sustainability themes and related factors, and sensitivity to broader policy and detailed implementation scales. The framework provides guidance for further studying both the social objectives and outcomes of smart city policies.