Sustainability in Smart Cities: Balancing Social, Economic, Environmental, and Institutional Aspects of Urban Life

This chapter first introduces the concept of sustainability and its dimensions, and then focuses on the assessment of sustainability, its current practices, and the existing limitations and shortcomings. It also provides a complete list of smart cities' definitions from perspective of various stakeholders. The chapter further discusses how the concept of sustainability has been adopted and integrated in such definitions, and how smart cities can help in improving limitations in sustainability assessment. The initial definitional focus of the concept of smart cities was on the significance of ICT with regard to modern infrastructures within cities. Later, some experts criticized such definitions as being too technically oriented and suggested to add a strong governance‐oriented approach that emphasizes the role of social capital and governance into this conceptual framework. Finally, the chapter defines a smart city as a city where information and communication technology (ICT) is used to achieve a balanced and intergenerational sustainability in urban life.