Smart sustainable city frameworks and KPIs

In the subject of smart sustainable cities, the underlying theories are a foundation for practice. Moreover, scholarly research in the field of smart sustainable cities operates out of the understanding that advances in the underlying knowledge necessitate pursuing multifaceted questions that can only be resolved from the vantage point of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity. Indeed, research problems in this field are inherently too complex to be addressed by single disciplines. The PhD study addressing the topic of smart sustainable city development falls within the broad research field of sustainability transition and sustainability science where ICT is seen as a salient factor given its transformational, disruptive, and synergetic effects as an enabling, integrative, and constitutive technology. In light of this, the approach to the PhD study is of an applied theoretical kind, and its aim is to investigate and analyze how to advance and sustain the contribution of sustainable urban forms to the goals of sustainable development with support of ICT of pervasive computing. This is to primarily create a framework for strategic smart sustainable city development based on scientific principles, theories, and academic disciplines and discourses used to guide urban actors in their practice towards sustainability and analyze its impact. This involves the application of a set of integrative foundational elements drawn from urban planning, urban design, sustainability, sustainable development, sustainability science, data science, computer science, complexity science, systems theory, systems thinking, and ICT. Accordingly, it is deemed of high significance to devise a multidimensional framework consisting of relevant theories and academic disciplines and discourses