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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of creativity and innovation as important attributes of smartness in cities/destination branding.

A conceptual support to the notion of smart destination branding is provided by discussing the relationship between creativity, innovation and technology as determinants for the smartness concept applied to destination branding and marketing. This paper adopts a qualitative and logical-deductive approach. The cases of Milan (Italy) and Tomsk (Russia) are presented and compared as smart cities approach to branding within and outside Europe. The authors emphasise the importance of smart destination branding strategies based on people participation, creativity and innovation as drivers of smart urban development.

The endogenous ability of cities/destinations to embrace creativity across stakeholders is essential to smart branding strategies relying on advanced information and communication technologies. The entwined connection between smart cities/destinations creative initiatives and innovation underpins innovative branding strategies.

The paper is conceptual and the findings cannot be generalised to other destinations, even if a couple of examples are briefly discussed. The authors intend to provide a basis for future research concerning smart destination branding.

The technological, human and institutional dimensions of smart cities and smart tourism destinations have been increasingly addressed by scholars and practitioners. Despite the reference and attention to human factors is not new, there is still a lack of extensive focus on creativity as crucial driver of innovation in smart destination branding. This paper aims to fill such gap by focussing on the implications of urban smartness driven by creativity and innovation in destination branding and marketing.

The purpose of this study is to identify the pathway that leads to cities to proceeding towards urban sustainability.

This study intends to propose a theoretical analysis on the city as sustainable community that drives urban development adopting a smart vision for urban growth.

Cities as sustainable urban communities develop smartness as a vision for change understanding and developing the potential offered by information technology reinforcing the community by shaping collaborative governance.

Cities using information technology as a source for urban sustainability develop smartness to evolve as smart communities following a managerial and organizational view towards sustainability as a source for continuous innovation and change within urban ecosystem.

Cities identify a sustainability-oriented and community-driven pathway as a vision for continuous change that helps to improve urban competitiveness, innovation and democracy ensuring high quality of life by strengthening the potential offered by technology-enabled and human-centred smartness.

Sustainable urban development involves integrating intelligent technology into urban planning to promote economic growth, social services, and environmental preservation. It fosters inclusiveness, safety, resilience, and sustainability in urban environments. However, this strategy faces challenges balancing economic growth, social equality, and environmental preservation. Design experts must balance economic development with sustainability preservation to achieve sustainable urban development. They depend on technology for smarter communities. The paper aims to identify the criteria for sustainable urban design and design professionals' bias and their awareness of using the fourth industrial revolution technologies.

The research methodology involves a document review to identify criteria and weights for sustainable urban design. A questionnaire was conducted with 30 design professionals to understand their preferences and biases. A hierarchical framework was created, and pairwise comparisons were computed using an AHP Online System. The weight of each criterion was calculated by aggregating normalized pairwise values within each row and dividing by the total number of cells. The Consistency Ratio (CR) was determined by aggregating the values in the row to produce the weighted aggregate value for each principle.

The document review emphasizes the significance of sustainable urban design, livability, intelligence, and environmental conservation in sustainable communities. However, participants often overlook these aspects, focusing on comfort, privacy, security, and exclusiveness. They also ignore the need for smart city technologies and environmental protection. This lack of understanding may hinder Egypt’s achievement of SDG11.

The paper’s main limitation is the small sample size and composition, as all participants were Egyptians working in Egypt or the Arabian Gulf region. The findings cannot be generalized, and future research could involve a team from different regions. Egypt needs to address the lack of knowledge and awareness of sustainable urban design principles among design professionals to achieve SDG 11 goals. This can be achieved through educational initiatives, readjusting priorities towards sustainability, harmonizing policy and practice with sustainable urban design principles, and interdisciplinary teamwork. Design professionals should customize their methods to suit local requirements and ecological circumstances.

The paper reveals that many design professionals lack an integrated and holistic understanding of sustainable urban design principles that the document review outlined. Their responses and practices reveal an incomplete understanding of sustainable urban development, requiring attention to organizing the profession, training practitioners, and reforming planning education. The paper shows that AHP has the potential to serve as a suitable instrument for decision-making; nonetheless, it is essential to exercise caution when interpreting its outcomes.

The study aims to use DfX to develop a comprehensive database of smart and resilient indicators that assists city administrators and authorities alike. The Smart and Resilient Cities Indicators Bank (SRCIB) will identify the level of smart and resilience determinants that will simultaneously provide ways to improve the city's infrastructure to meet smart and resilient objectives.

Design of excellence (DfX) is adopted in dissecting from four best indicators of established systems, and a database of indicators is developed and specified in diverse ways. A new indicator system is then created for smart and resilient cities.

The proposed indicator bank consists of four layers consisting of dimension, sub-dimension, key issues and the number of indicators resulting from four different indicator systems that the study have analysed.

The proposed indicator bank is an exploratory approach that needs to be tested in a real scenario because the urban systems are complex inter-related systems with too many variables that may influence actual outcomes. Thus, the proposed indicators bank does not attempt to quantify or solve related urban issues commonly address in smart and resilient city concepts but more to enhance the management of attaining towards smart and resilient specifications.

The proposed indicator bank is an exploratory approach that needs to be tested in a real scenario because the urban systems are complex inter-related systems with too many variables that may influence actual outcomes. Thus, the proposed indicators bank does not attempt to quantify or solve related urban issues commonly address smart and resilient city concepts but more to enhance the management of attaining smart and resilient specifications.

The study builds a robust guide for assessing smart and resilient cities that is yet a widely accessible assessment framework. The proposed SRCIB allows local authorities and relevant stakeholders of typical cities to better manage its urban agenda towards smart and resilient city objectives when specific indicators are defined. Besides, a smart city can become resilient; likewise, a resilient city can become smart as the SRCIB is comprehensive.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the perceptions of visitors in terms of multiple aspects of smart cities to allow wise decisions to be made about smart tourist destinations by municipal governments and tourism authorities.

This study takes a sample of inbound visitors (n=205) from Hong Kong as an empirical questionnaire-based survey on visitors’ perceptions of these smart city attributes, which are collected from literature, and framed in Cohen’s Smart City Wheel.

This paper identifies the distinctive factors for branding Hong Kong as a smart city. The results from the factor analysis identify four factors for determining what a smart city is from the perspective of visitors, namely, the quality of a smart society: energy consumption in an urban environment, smart city governance and smart city livelihood. The first two factors further become the determinants of a successful smart city brand considered by visitors, which contribute to their locational decisions and thus the strategies and policies of smart destination branding.

The results obtained can serve as insights for tourism policy makers and destination marketers when considering significant information and communication technology, or other smart and sustainable attributes for city branding (e.g. Buhalis and Amaranggana, 2014; Marine-Roig and Anton Clavé, 2015), as well as common investment and resource allocation for shared benefits in similar metropolises.

The smartness factors represent important dimensions of urban smartness as prioritized areas for further development, innovation and marketing of tourism industries and enterprises in Hong Kong, as a mature urban destination incorporating the branding of a proposed smart district as a strategy of urban development.

Smart urban development and tourism development have increasingly become inseparable, especially when visitors utilize cities as tourist destinations but share other urban resources and spaces with local citizens. Unlike the development of smart tourist attractions, smart tourist destinations should have a wider scope of smartness. A smart tourist destination may carry similar and overlapping characteristics of smart cities, which may be interpreted by visitors and may eventually affect their perceived image of a city.

Grounded in service-dominant (S-D) logic, the purpose of this paper is to explore the core components of smartness to present a framework for the development of the smart tourism destination.

The paper explores the core components of smartness through case study analysis of well-established smart cities.

The paper conceptualises smartness and argues ICT, leadership, innovation and social capital supported by human capital are core components of smartness. Although ICT is a critical enabler for smart tourism destinations, it is insufficient on its own to introduce smartness. The combination of hard and soft smartness components within a S-D logic ecosystem structure holds the potential for sustained competitive advantage and enhancement of quality of life of both residents and tourists in smart tourism destinations.

The paper extends the application of S-D logic to the context of smart tourism destinations, specifically to examine the smartness concept as a means for competitiveness in tourism destinations.

The paper explores the emergence of smart city governance with a particular focus on the cognitive value of the new technologies and the different accountabilities emerging in the digital infrastructures attempting to visualize and rationalize urban dynamics.

Drawing on ethnographic, netnographic and interview data from an empirical case study of the Smart and Wise City Turku spearhead project, the study builds on the assumption that smart cities emerge from the interaction between the characteristics of technologies, constellations of actors and contextual conditions.

The results report smart city activities as an organizational process and a reconfiguration that incorporates new technology with old infrastructure. Through the lens of the empirical examples, we are able to show how smart city actors, boundaries and infrastructures are mobilized, become valuable and are rendered visible. The smart cities infrastructure traces, values and governs actors, identities, objects, ideas and relations to animate new desires and feats of imagination.

In terms of implications to practice, the situated descriptions echo recent calls to leaders and managers to ask how much traceability is enough (Power, 2019) and limits of accountability (Messner, 2009).

The central theoretical concept of “thinking infrastructure” highlights how new accounting practices operate by disclosing (Kornberger et al., 2017) new worlds where the platforms and the users discover the nature of their responsibilities to the other. The contribution of this paper is that it examines what happens when smartness is understood as a thinking infrastructure. Different theorizations of infrastructure have implications for the study of smart cities. The lens helps us grasp possible tensions and consequences in terms of accountability that arise from new forms of participation in smart cities. It helps urban governance scholarship understand how smartness informs and shapes distributed and embodied cognition.

This paper aims to develop a framework that could establish and further the terminology of smart city/resilient city discourse in that resilience could support urban “smartness”, a term that is widely argued being not easily measured nor quantifiably assessed.

The qualitative approach was employed, and based on selected keywords, a systematic literature review was carried out to understand the main themes within the smart city and resilient city concepts databases. Upon screening, 86 papers were used and synthesised through the meta-synthesis method using both synthesis approach, meta-aggregation and meta-ethnography that systematically identifies both properties and characteristics, to build an innovative framework as an indicator-based smart/resilience quantification model.

Two novel frameworks are proposed, smart resilient city (SRC) and resilient smart city (RSC), as guidelines regulatory that establish a city's smartness and resilience.

The quantitative research phase is not provided as the framework builds on the exploratory approach in which the model is proposed through the postulation of data definitions.

Although the study's scope was limited to the city, proposed frameworks may be interpreted for other contexts that deal with the topic of resilience and smart.

The established framework proposal would encourage further exploration in context, serving as an inspiration for other scholars, decision-makers, as well as municipalities to keep strengthening smart city through resilience factors.

The technological revolution is fundamentally changing our lifestyle, work, and communication. There is still no accurate information about the future of this great transformation, but one thing is quite clear: the speed of the transformations in terms of scale and complexity, like a storm, will go through all aspects of a society's life and change all the current paradigms. One of the expectations from the fourth industrial revolution will be the expansion of smart cities in accordance with sustainable development criteria. In order for a city to be truly smart and innovative, city officials must pay attention to elements such as renewable and clean energy such as the internet of things, smart networks, smart parking, and smart transportation. In another sense, there must be a balance between economy, environment, and society in order to build a strong, sustainable, and flexible smart city that will survive the test of time. Of course, based on the 7PS model, the dimensions of culture and education are very important and fundamental for high sustainability. Researchers and those involved in the implementation of smart cities have explained the main indicators to identify these cities, which include some of the following items: For example, smart building, environmental protection, smart garbage collection, digitization of all government affairs and administrative work, widespread use of smartphones and electronic devices, complete, convenient, and universal access to the internet, car sharing service and online taxi. Other important indicators include the intelligentization of the traffic system and urban planning, citizen participation, economic ecosystem, optimization in electricity, water and energy consumption, development of electric and electric public transportation fleet, quality control and management, and reduction of air pollution. In this chapter, the theory of i-Sustainability Plus and i-Comprehensive Strategic Urban Plan is introduced as the beating heart of the ubiquitous blue-green smart city design. In such urban areas, it is all about the combination of real life, virtual reality, and in addition the future of clean technologies. In general, it can be said that sustainable smart cities are a solution to combat the challenges of urbanization.

In this study, the deployment of an integrated Quality Function Deployment (QFD) decision framework is presented to help cities design targeted strategies to become “smart”. Arguably smart cities leverage advanced technologies to enhance their smartness to improve everyday urban life. To this end, a QFD – Analytic Hierarchy Process – Analytic Network Process (QFD-AHP-ANP) framework is proposed to deliver guidance for selecting the appropriate mix of smart technologies based on the specific smart needs of each city.

The AHP and ANP methods are incorporated into QFD to enhance its methodological robustness in formulating the decision problem. AHP accurately captures and translates the “Voice of the Experts” into prioritized “Smart City” dimensions, while establishing inter-relationships between these dimensions and “Smart City Technologies”. Meanwhile, ANP explores tradeoffs among the technologies, enabling well-informed decisions. The framework’s effectiveness is evaluated through an illustrative application in the city of Thessaloniki.

Applying the framework to this real-world context confirms its practicality and utility, demonstrating its ability to particularize local, social, political, environmental and economic trends through the resulting mix of technologies in smart urban development strategies.

The importance of this study lies in several aspects. Firstly, it introduces a novel QFD decision framework tailored for smart city strategic planning. Secondly, it contributes to the operationalization of the smart city concept by providing guidance for cities to effectively adopt smart technologies. Finally, this study represents a new field of application for QFD, expanding its scope beyond its traditional domains.