Developing Smart Sustainable Cities: a Validated Transformation Framework

The urbanization phenomenon and its related challenges has been directing city planners towards seeking to transform their cities into being smart and sustainable. Different approaches were introduced in the literature to assist in the development of a framework to facilitate the transformation process of traditional cities into Smart Sustainable Cities (SSCs). However, a thorough analysis of these approaches clearly shows that none of them cover holistically the six dimensions of SSCs throughout the transformation process. In some instances, existing frameworks neglect analyzing the current economic, social, environmental, and political states and challenges of a city. Another group of frameworks falls short in addressing one or more of the dimensions of a SSC. The limitations of the approaches are numerous but what is of utmost importance is that none of the existing frameworks attributes attention to checking the city readiness for change before planning a smart urban transformation process. The latter constitutes a knowledge gap that this research highlights and addresses through a sound theoretical foundation mainly based on the Theory of Change and the sustainable urban development approach. Accordingly, this paper proposes a coherent, systematic transformation framework that adopts a holistic modality capturing the crosscutting readiness of the city along the different dimensions of a SSC. The proposed framework guides and facilitates the transformation of traditional cities into smart and sustainable ones and has an added value to knowledge and practice. It highlights the need for an additional starting phase throughout the transformation process based on an established theory. It aims at assisting city planners, decision and policy makers, and key stakeholders in understanding the essential aspects to be considered during their cities transformation journey. Lastly yet importantly, this paper summarizes the results of a robust validation process undertaken to confirm the proposed components of a holistic SSC framework. This is done via surveying several global experts in the area from different countries around the world.