The core academic and scientific disciplines underlying data-driven smart sustainable urbanism: an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary framework

Abstract

AbstractA new era is presently unfolding wherein both smart urbanism and sustainable urbanism processes and practices are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism under what has to be identified as data-driven smart sustainable urbanism. This flourishing field of research is profoundly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. It operates out of the understanding that advances in knowledge necessitate pursuing multifaceted questions that can only be resolved from the vantage point of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. This implies that the research problems within the field of data-driven smart sustainable urbanism are inherently too complex and dynamic to be addressed by single disciplines. As this field is not a specific direction of research, it does not have a unitary disciplinary framework in terms of a uniform set of the academic and scientific disciplines from which the underlying theories can be drawn. These theories constitute a unified foundation for the practice of data-driven smart sustainable urbanism. Therefore, it is of significant importance to develop an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary framework. With that in regard, this paper identifies, describes, discusses, evaluates, and thematically organizes the core academic and scientific disciplines underlying the field of data-driven smart sustainable urbanism. This work provides an important lens through which to understand the set of established and emerging disciplines that have high integration, fusion, and application potential for informing the processes and practices of data-driven smart sustainable urbanism. As such, it provides fertile insights into the core foundational principles of data-driven smart sustainable urbanism as an applied domain in terms of its scientific, technological, and computational strands. The novelty of the proposed framework lies in its original contribution to the body of foundational knowledge of an emerging field of urban planning and development.