Discussion and conclusion
Environmental externalities mainly generated from population increase, rapid urbanization, high private motor vehicle dependency, deregulated industrialization, and mass livestock production have placed serious concerns for the future of our wellbeing, and even our existence in the long run. Realization of the fact that urgent measures must be taken to combat environmental externalities responsibly, effectively, and efficiently have resulted in the rediscovery of the need for more eco-friendly practices. Subsequently, during the last few decades, sustainability and sustainable development have become popular topics not only for scholars, particularly in the fields of environmental economics, technology and science, urban planning, development, and management, but also for urban policy makers and professional practitioners (Yigitcanlar et al. 2015). The emergence of these new concepts starting from early 1970s is an outcome of the response to the growing concerns about the impacts of development practices on the state of the environment (Yigitcanlar and Kamruzzaman 2015).
Over the past decade smart urban technologies, as part of the smart and sustainable city agenda, have begun to blanket our cities with an aim of forming the backbone of a large and intelligent infrastructure. Along with this development, dissemination of the sustainability ideology has had a significant imprint on the planning and development of our cities. Today, the smart city concept is viewed as a vision, manifesto or promise aiming to constitute the twenty-first century’s sustainable and ideal city form. In other words, smart city is an efficient, technologically advanced, green and socially inclusive city (Vanolo 2014). This is to say, smart city applications place a particular technology focus at the forefront of generating solutions for ecological, societal, economic, and management challenges (Yigitcanlar 2016).
