This book presents the latest scientific and technical advances in the fields of Smart Cities and Smart Territories. It shows outcomes of 2nd Sustainable Smart Cities and Territories International Conference in Manizales (Colombia) on June 21–23, 2023. The concept of smart cities, which emerged in the early 2000s, attempts to solve these challenges by implementing information and communication technologies. The initial concept of smart cities focused on the modernization of megacities.

This book constitutes the proceedings of this year’s Sustainable Smart Cities and Territories International Conference (SSCt 2021), held in Doha, Qatar, from the 27th to the 29th of April 2021. The SSCt 2021 is an open symposium that brings together researchers and developers from academia and industry to present and discuss the latest scientific and technical advances in the fields of Smart Cities and Smart Territories. It promotes an environment for discussion on how techniques, methods, and tools help system designers accomplish the transition from the current cities towards those we need in a changing world. The program includes keynote abstracts, a main technical track, two workshops, and a doctoral consortium. The symposium is organized by the Texas A&M University at Qatar. We would like to thank all the contributing authors, the members of the Local Committee, Scientific Committee, Organizing Committee, and the sponsors (Texas A&M University of Qatar, AIR Institute and the IoT Digital Innovation Hub) for their hard work and dedication.

This book discusses the architecture, design and implementation of critical components of Sustainable Smart Cities to support governance, transportation, energy, healthcare, factories, technologies, securities, agriculture and education. The authors discuss the background of sustainable smart cities architectures and technologies and describe the problems that arise in design and implementation. In particular, this book discusses a proposed, 6G-based framework and architecture of IoT based sustainable smart cities. The authors describe the use of artificial intelligence in many zones of cities to increase the system's performance and efficiency. With the detailed discussion of energy management in smart cities, they have also presented how Internet of Vehicles (IoV) uses wireless communication and sensing technology to establish a network of information exchange between vehicles, infrastructure, and the environment. The discussion also includes Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) as well as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for IoT based sustainable smart cities. This book explores societal, economic, and practical reforms that would promote smart cities, based on a variety of case studies.

This publication advocates a "cities-based" approach to sustainable development which recognizes the central and integrating role that cities and urban living play in developing sustainability. It highlights that, similarly to the financial crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has shown that different cities have different capacities to cope with crises. Both crises disproportionally affected different cities and population groups; the most vulnerable suffering most. Cities need to develop innovative methods to confront infectious diseases without relying on drastic lockdown restrictions.

This volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities. It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:• Citizen participation and empowerment • Value creation mechanisms • Public administration• Quality of life and sustainability• Democracy• ICT• Private initiatives and entrepreneurship Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city’s status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens’ participation and the public administration’s agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. Featuring contributions with models, tools and cases from around the world, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers, students, academics, professionals and policymakers interested in smart cities.

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.