Managing urban infrastructure transitions for smart sustainable cities

Traditionally, the development and management of urban subsystems were seen as a basic engineering and administrative task. The infrastructural system approaches developed throughout the 20th century are no longer adequate to effectively address the current and future challenges that face cities. The concept of a smart sustainable city has emerged as a new urban development ideal with the aim of integrating the smart city and sustainable city paradigms, as smart city capabilities can be incorporated as a leverage to achieve the sustainability goals of the city. The nature of the existing literature related to smart sustainable city transitioning is investigated in a literature review. It is seen that there is a need for the development of a holistic framework for smart sustainable cities to guide and assist city planners, urban governance structures and policy makers to plan, manage and implement purposeful and effective urban transitions. Within the existing literature there is an absence of such a framework as a holistic guideline to address the uncertainties surrounding the real-world implementation of smart sustainable cities. From literature it is becoming clear that systems thinking provides a meaningful perspective from which to understand the dynamics of cities and urban change. Transitioning existing cities to become smart sustainable cities would require adaptation of the infrastructure networks that guide the functioning of the city and thus provide a meaningful point of intervention. The literature review and the planned work that build upon it forms an important contribution to the understanding, implementation and policy design of smart sustainable cities.