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As a consequence of rapid urbanisation and globalisation, cities have become the engines of population and economic growth. Hence, natural resources in and around the cities have been exposed to externalities of urban development processes. This paper introduces a new sustainability assessment approach that is tested in a pilot study. The paper aims to assist policy‐makers and planners investigating the impacts of development on environmental systems, and produce effective policies for sustainable urban development.

The paper introduces an indicator‐based indexing model entitled “Indexing Model for the Assessment of Sustainable Urban Ecosystems” (ASSURE). The ASSURE indexing model produces a set of micro‐level environmental sustainability indices that is aimed to be used in the evaluation and monitoring of the interaction between human activities and urban ecosystems. The model is an innovative approach designed to assess the resilience of ecosystems towards impacts of current development plans and the results serve as a guide for policy‐makers to take actions towards achieving sustainability.

The indexing model has been tested in a pilot case study within the Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia. This paper presents the methodology of the model and outlines the preliminary findings of the pilot study. The paper concludes with a discussion on the findings and recommendations put forward for future development and implementation of the model.

Presently, there is a few sustainability indices developed to measure the sustainability at local, regional, national and international levels. However, due to challenges in data collection difficulties and availability of local data, there is no effective assessment model at the micro‐level that the assessment of urban ecosystem sustainability accurately. The model introduced in this paper fills this gap by focusing on parcel‐scale and benchmarking the environmental performance in micro‐level.

This study aims to detect preschool and primary school student–teachers’ (STs) views about the social pillar of urban sustainability and particularly about the importance they attach to various social aspects of urban sustainability, and the perceived effectiveness of education in influencing these aspects.

A custom-designed questionnaire comprising eight literature-based social aspects of urban sustainability was developed and administered to 207 STs during the spring semester of 2015-2016, in the school of education, of a university located in northern Greece.

The highest levels of importance were attached to the aspect of “Health”, whereas aspects related to “Policy and Governance” were considered as the least important of all social aspects of urban sustainability. The aspect considered most easily influenced through education was that of “Human Relations”, in contrast to the aspect of “Housing” in which education was considered as the least effective. Also, STs considered every aspect of social urban sustainability to be more important than able to be influenced by education, revealing that they are somewhat sceptical of the effectiveness of education in this field.

The participation of only student-teachers and the use of quantitative research tools are among the main limitation of the study. Future research should include teachers, both in-service and pre-service, from various disciplines and educational levels, and should employ a combination of quantitative with qualitative methods of analysis.

Insight into STs’ views can serve as a useful guidance for teacher education programs, providing information about necessary actions that have to be taken for the improvement of both pre- and in-service teacher educations.

There is a great lack of research around pre- and in-service teachers’ views about the importance of sustainability and the role of education in influencing it. Existing research is further scarcer when it comes to the investigation of the social pillar of urban sustainability, as literature usually focuses either on the environmental pillar of sustainability or on the concept of sustainable development in general.

The purpose of this study is to examine the stadiums in Turkey within the scope of sustainability and evaluate their impact on sustainable urban development.

In the study, at first, the “Sustainable Stadium Assessment Tool”, where the final score ranges from 0 to 100 and the evaluation is made as bronze, silver, gold and platinum according to the score ranges, is developed. With this assessment tool, a total of 20 stadiums built or renovated/restored between 2008 and 2018 in Turkey is examined in social, environmental, economic dimensions within the scope of sustainability, and the current situation is revealed within the frame of sustainable urban development.

As a result of the study, it was determined that among the stadiums evaluated, only two stadiums have sustainability properties at platinum level, three stadiums at gold level while the remaining stadiums mainly at silver level.

To date, no assessment tool has been created in the field of sports management that can assess the sustainable properties of stadiums. Therefore, the “Sustainable Stadium Assessment Tool” created within the scope of the study is the foremost in the field of sports sciences and sports management with its different qualities in national and international terms. In addition, the examination of the stadiums in the social, environmental, economic dimensions within the scope of sustainability and revealed the current situation is also the first, and it contains information that will make very significant scientific contributions to the relevant field.

This paper investigates the potential contribution of smart city approaches and tools to sustainable urban development in the environment domain. Recent research has highlighted the need to explore the relation of smart and sustainable cities more systematically, focusing on practical applications that could enable a deeper understanding of the included domains, typologies and design concepts, and this paper aims to address this research gap. At the same time, it tries to identify whether these applications could contribute to the “zero vision” strategy, an extremely ambitious challenge within the field of smart cities.

This objective is pursued through an in-depth investigation of available open source and proprietary smart city applications related to environmental sustainability in urban environments. A total of 32 applications were detected through the Intelligent/Smart Cities Open Source (ICOS) community, a meta-repository for smart cities solutions. The applications are analyzed comparatively regarding (i) the environmental issue addressed, (ii) the associated mitigation strategies, (iii) the included innovation mechanism, (iv) the role of information and communication technologies and (v) the overall outcome.

The findings suggest that the smart and sustainable city landscape is extremely fragmented both on the policy and the technical levels. There is a host of unexplored opportunities toward smart sustainable development, many of which are still unknown. Similar findings are reached for all categories of environmental challenges in cities. Research limitations pertain to the analysis of a relatively small number of applications. The results can be used to inform policy making toward becoming more proactive and impactful both locally and globally. Given that smart city application market niches are also identified, they are also of special interest to developers, user communities and digital entrepreneurs.

The value added by this paper is two-fold. At the theoretical level, it offers a neat conceptual bridge between smart and sustainable cities debate. At the practical level, it identifies under-researched and under-exploited fields of smart city applications that could be opportunities to attain the “zero vision” objective.

This viewpoint paper aims to discuss sustainable digitalisation of facilities management (FM) through the implementation of the newly recognised International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards within the ISO 41000 series.

This viewpoint paper provides a review of the literature of the recent ISO documents and academic study. The content is also dependent on the authors’ opinions and interpretation.

FM is currently shifting emphasis towards a strategic focus through the adoption of the new recognised international ISO standards that consider sustainable digitalisation in business decisions. However, the FM sector is encountering potential risks to the implementation of the new recognised international ISO standards. Digitalisation is one kind of force that has shaped the management of the built environment and FM recently and rapidly, especially in the Covid-19 period. This is impacting the FM industry. As standardisation aims at establishing a constantly evolving baseline of proven practices, standardisation can be considered a part of sustainable FM. It is believed that standardised and strategic level support is crucial for the smooth adoption of sustainable FM practices and processes. Standards such as the ISO standards, applied to the global FM industry, help in objectively quantifying the added value of FM to the core business. Advanced technology and digitalisation can contribute to the sustainability of any profession and industry, but it also requires a community to tackle the problems.

This paper contributes to the FM industry by making recommendations for improvement in the use of digitalisation. In summary, the significant finding of this viewpoint paper is that digitalisation offers both possibilities and problems in the application of the new recognised international ISO standards within the FM industry.

The concept of knowledge cities (KCs) is particularly advantageous for any contemporary city. Many cities globally claim themselves as being already KCs, while other cities have elaborated strategic plans in order to be transformed into KCs. The examination of their approaches reveals that these initiatives are fragmented and there is not a unified and coherent methodological approach. The purpose of this paper is to present the basic elements of a methodological approach for the integrated development of a KC.

The examination and analysis of many cities' approaches, on a previous research work, have permitted one to identify an emerging pattern of successful KCs' main characteristics and features. These characteristics served as the basis in order to develop a methodological approach for the development of a KC.

The paper presents the basic elements of a methodological approach, named KnowCis (knowledge cities), which consists of five main phases.

The concept of KCs is very broad and consequently the purpose of the proposed approach is to incorporate all the related aspects. A suggestion for future research is the enhancement of the approach in order to incorporate additional aspects of a city's life.

The KnowCis approach is a useful tool for any city that intends to be developed as a KC. At this stage there is an ongoing collaboration with a Greek city for its pilot application.

The approach presented in this paper is unified and it can be easily adapted in order to comply with the particular characteristics of each city.

This study aims to explore the potential dynamics between performance measurement at the organisational level and emerging urban development projects at the macro-institutional field level of sustainability governance and accountability.

Using a theoretical triangulation between three theories, namely contingency theory, institutional theory and social cognitive theory, this study investigates not only the macro-micro dynamics, but also the (recursive) micro-macro dynamics between performance measurement and urban development. Using an Egyptian public sector urban development organisation and its sustainable energy project as an empirical example, interviews, documents and observations were collected.

The dynamics emerged between field urban development projects and the (unintended) organisational implementation of the performance measurement system, the sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) reporting system. Contributing to previous literature, these dynamics have been institutionalised through (three) interrelated levels: the (macro-field) urban development contingencies and pressures for sustainability KPIs reporting, the (organisational) institutionalisation of the urban development performance measurement system and then the (micro-organisational) cognitive role of sustainability KPIs reports in (re)making political urban development decisions.

This study faced some limitations that paved the way for future research axes. For political and security reasons, difficulties were encountered in conducting interviews with government actors in the sustainable energy project under study. Also, due to the practical separation of the environmental sustainability system from the sustainability KPIs reporting system in this case study, environmental sustainability is outside the scope.

Sustainability reports may influence public sector decision-making processes in a specific urban development context. These KPIs reports may also increase public sector management opportunities for urban auditing, transparency, accountability and sustainability governance. These KPIs may also guide public sector management to lower prices in poor villages to increase smart energy consumption and improve community health.

Sustainability reports may increase decision-makers' understanding of consumer behaviours and societal changes. This may help in making appropriate political decisions to improve their welfare and regular smart energy consumption. Not only urban citizens, but this social advantage may also extend to urban development employees through employees' promotion, training and access to government-funded academic and professional scholarships.

This study is an attempt to develop current public sector performance measurement analyses in the emerging urban development field using a triadic analytical approach. This study also fed the literature with an extended case study that clarified the (multi-level) and (two-way) dynamics between performance measurement and urban development.

System dynamics is a whole-system modelling and learning approach, useful for tackling non-linear problems, such as sustainable urban development. The purpose of this paper is to review system dynamics applications in the simulation of sustainable urban development over a period from 2005 to 2017.

The analysis reveals that the number of applications of system dynamics modelling in the area of urban sustainable development increased in the analysed period. Research has changed its focus from the modelling of environmental problems to more complex models, portraying the multidimensional socio-economic processes that have an impact on the sustainability of urban development. Analysed case studies most often use the behaviour reproduction test for model validation, but without a unified approach. In most cases, modelling has been done in China, Germany and the USA, while urban development in the Eastern European countries, Africa and Latin America has not often been investigated. This paper indicates the knowledge gaps and suggests future research directions.

Papers that report the use of system dynamics modelling reveal a wide range of applications in urban sustainability. The analysis shows significant emphasis on environmental problems, while the interest for modelling social problems has been increasing during the last several years. Most of the modelled problems examine the sustainability of resources (land, water) and waste management, which are used for insights into the reasons for the system behaviour, forecasting future behaviour and policy testing.

The presented models were developed in most cases for the purpose of understanding the phenomena examined, as well as the future use of the models in policy planning. This brings us back to the need for greater stakeholder involvement, not only in the initial phase, but also during the whole modelling process, which could increase understanding, use and ownership of the models in the future, and thus increase their practical application.

Achieving sustainable development in terms of people, prosperity and partnership is the main aspect in any country’s plan for development. This sustainable development has to be achieved in three major dimensions, that is, economic, social and environmental in an integrated, balanced and systematic way. The same is highlighted in the United Nations’ (UN) vision for sustainable development by 2030. The purpose of this study is to identify the critical barriers of urban sustainability and gender equality with reference to Indian context, to suggest the strategies to achieve sustainable development in the referred area and to evaluate the relationship between them.

The major contribution of this study lies in the development of a contextual relationship model from the various identified critical barriers in Indian context, using interpretive structural modeling with MICMAC analysis.

Of the 17 goals given by UN, considering the Indian context, the goals of building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization and fostering innovation; promoting sustained and inclusive economic growth along with full and productive employment and decent work for all; and gender equality and empowering women at all levels seem to be the major challenges and the same are selected in this study for further analysis. To understand the major challenges in these areas and also to find the way forward, the study has set following three major objectives: to identify the critical barriers of urban sustainability and gender equality with reference to Indian context; to suggest the strategies to achieve sustainable development in the referred area; and to evaluate the relationship between them.

Considering the highly volatile and complex demand requirements, this approach may help to enable the government to tackle issues/challenges related to both urban sustainability and gender inequality on priority basis and in a holistic manner to achieve the goals of sustainable development, thereby improving the quality of life.

Community arts practice gives voice to a younger generation, who must be studied as part of the development process from commencement, to accomplish building sustainable destination development in the direction of future prosperity for the rural community.

This paper challenges a relatively weak critical practice of the community-based tourism (CBT) by introducing community arts methodologies as a research approach in the context of tourism, the opportunity is created to give voice to a younger generation that must also be included in the development aims of the CBT to achieve sustainable community tourism development.

The CBT aims to support access to quality participation in the development process. However, investment in education and building tourism entrepreneurs is not inclusive of the future generations beyond the original generation. Consideration of the desires and imaginations of the future generations must be part of the CBT project for tourism development sustainability. Building awareness of the fragility and value of tourist attractions and resources, in a younger generation that never experienced the original attractions of the traditional village, is critical to achieving the objectives of the CBT.

The paper is not yet attempting to examine the empirical data of this research. Rather, it challenges current CBT research processes as having a narrow reach into a community.

Tourism developers and local communities should include an understanding of what directions and what opportunities the next and future generations will have to continue sustainable development. Including children’s imaginations into a community’s tourism development plans will benefit awareness of the present context and assist locals in forecasting the next stage of village development. The present tourism planners would then have a holistic vision for a design strategy sustaining rural livelihoods that acknowledge the limits of nature-based resources and cultural resources.

Community arts research offers the possibility of inclusive participation of community members. Arts methodology attempts to articulate ideas in visual form, for the aim of discussion, reflection and realization of the desires and concerns of the community in terms of lifestyle, environment and cultural heritage, in preparation for the future generation taking control of tourism development. The process aims to impact future decisions effecting the course of tourism development in rural Thailand.

The paper discusses the potential contribution of community arts practice as a complementary tool by taking into account different aspects of sustainable tourism into CBT concept. The paper evaluates what has been missing in advancing our understanding of sustainable rural tourism development in Thailand. It fills the gaps with a methodological approach that gives voice to the local community. The purpose of this paper is to rethinking the ideology and approach of CBT to be inclusive of all demographics of society for the goal of achieving sustainable tourism and sustainable community development in Thailand context.