Tools and Technologies for Planning the Development of Smart Cities

At present, sustainable urban development constitutes a major planning goal for many urban environments coping with contemporary challenges and problems confronted by world cities. Towards this end, the concept of smart cities emerges as a promising policy option for effectively dealing with sustainability objectives. In this respect, the focus of the present paper is on the development of an ICT-enabled participatory planning framework for guiding policy-making towards the planning of smart cities. This framework is in alignment with the argument that smart-city solutions must start with the city not with the smart, shifting from a technology-pushed to an application-pulled smart-city planning approach, matching different types of smartness (technologies, tools, and applications) with different types of urban functions and contexts. It is also built upon a digital platform, integrating tools and technologies for data management and e-participatory planning that can support city- and citizen-specific decision making, capable of dealing with objectives for urban sustainability.