Intelligent Environments (Second Edition): Chapter 15 - Digital City Science—a platform methodology for sustainable urban development

While the systematic exploration of digital technologies, data, and computer science in the context of sustainable development is a major endeavor on its own, building the connection of digital city discourses to issues of urban sustainability emerges as a key challenge in future urban research. This chapter gives an outline of how the convergence of these two megatrends can be shaped into a comprehensive research and innovation program toward a new kind of city science that may help to stabilize climate conditions, lower resource spending, and support social empowerment. Chapter 1 introduces the city science paradigm, as evolved over the past decades and identifies its inherent logic driving it toward digitalization and data science. This chapter introduces urban sustainability as a new focus area of city science. Chapter 2 takes a more systematic perspective on urban digitalization, by explaining how Digital City Science has evolved as a new field of research and study. The chapter shows how data science has fueled research of urban complexity and outlines core principles of Digital City Science. It gives methodological and technological examples of the basic organon of Digital City Science. Chapter 3 discusses how the megatrend of sustainability relates to Digital City Science and pinpoints the relevant discourses and contact points that interlink both approaches. Chapter 4 illustrates the convergence of digital and sustainable city science approaches by a number of project cases, including works in the context of Hamburg's urban development as well as endeavors addressing urbanization issues on a global scale. Chapter 5 gives an outlook on the convergence of digital city and sustainable urban development trends, and lines out trajectories for future research. It discusses the applicability of Digital City Science approaches for urban sustainability issues and how they can support integrated development in a wider cultural and geographical context.