Digital technologies in urban planning and urban management

Abstract

Digital technologies in urban planning and urban management IntroductionOver the last decade, there has been growing attention to applying digital technologies in urban planning and management (see Geertman and Stillwell, 2020 for an overview).One of the underpinning reasons for this is the technological development and the global political, social, and economic push toward developing smart cities concepts and applications (Sabri, 2021).Similarly, attention to urban informatics, urban analytics, and city science paradigms is rising.Accordingly, the demand for new skill sets led the higher education institutes to offer new programs for training the next generation of urban planners with capabilities of urban analytics, urban informatics, and city science (see, e.g., Punt et al., 2020).Therefore, there is more appreciation for the practice of urban planning and management of emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Digital Twins (Lin & Benneker, 2022).In addition, the advancements in digital technologies, including cloud computing, high-performance, and optimized computing systems, as well as customized sensor manufacturing, increased the capability of agencies to collect, store, and process an unprecedented amount of data in very high resolution (Liu et al., 2022).For example, the essential role of cloud computing and digital platforms was acknowledged during the recent pandemic due to the COVID-19 outbreak (Kim et al., 2021).With these advancements in knowledge and technologies, we expect a paradigm shift and improvement in the quality of public services.However, the evidence suggests otherwise, and in many jurisdictions, the planning process is manual, paper-based, and tedious (Daniel & Pettit, 2021).As an example, in the process of decision-making for the development of infrastructure and assessment of building development proposals, there is a lack of data harmonization, which generate inaccurate, complex, and contestable results.While many ad hoc planning and decision-making processes may not be evidence-based, the role of digital technologies and best practices to support collaborative and inclusive decision-making needs to be further communicated.Therefore, in the wake of uncertainty on the implications of digital technologies and smart city investments for changing urban planning and urban management functions, this special issue aims to enlighten on their implications for urban planners.Recent literature indicates that the role of digital technologies in the urban planning and management context should be beyond the scope of automated routine functions serving buildings, infrastructures, and people (Sabri et al., 2015;Jiang, 2021).Instead, these technologies should create an integrative and collaborative ecosystem that facilitates a network and stream of continuous information to plan for equity, environmental sustainability, quality of place and life, and efficiency in cities (Sabri et al., 2016).Many governments, industries, and academia worldwide believe that adopting emerging technologies, including Digital Twins, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and IoT, can improve the quality of public services and result in community satisfaction and quality of life (ANZLIC, 2019;Dembski et al., 2020;Deren et al., 2021).However, it is unclear which planning processes can be affected and what are the benefits, advantages, risks, and implications of adopting such technologies.Against this background, the present special issue on 'Digital Technologies in Urban Planning and Urban Management' aims to stimulate theoretical discussion on this topic and contribute to a roadmap for the digital transformation of planning that supports quality urban planning and management. Outline of the special issueThe contributions to the special issue are structured as follows.After presenting a holistic overview of the academic debate on digitalization in urban planning and urban management (Mortaheb & Jankowski, 2022), we will highlight different examples of digital applications in urban planning from a planning professional's perspective (Liyanage et al., 2022;Al-Sehrawy et al., 2023), before reflecting on different examples of how such technologies are implemented in the local planning context (Jiang et al., 2022;Sucupira

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