A Survey on Adaptive Smart Urban Systems

The urbanisation of the last century has created a significant demand for urban areas to deliver public services that are efficient, sustainable, and adaptable. This demand is further amplified by the anticipated impacts of climate change and the complexities introduced by rapidly expanding urban populations. In this scenario, smart city initiatives have emerged as a pivotal strategy to address these challenges, leveraging innovative technologies and paradigms such as Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science to improve the quality of urban life in a more sustainable way. Recently, research efforts in these domains have focused on creating systems that can adapt and respond to changing conditions, enabling greater adaptivity and responsiveness to the needs of urban landscapes. Therefore, this article provides a comprehensive survey of adaptive urban services within a smart city context. Through analyses of recent literature, we investigate the technological foundations that enable the adaptivity of urban services and explore their applications in various urban scenarios, including energy, mobility, emergency management, public safety, and waste management. This article also highlights the benefits of adopting adaptive urban services, such as improved traffic management, resilient emergency management, and enhanced citizen engagement, bringing an important contribution to this broad research area. Finally, we provide a discussion on current technology enablers and challenges and present an overview for future research directions on adaptive urban systems at the forefront of transforming cities into more intelligent ecosystems.