Smart Cities and Smart Villages and the Global Digital Transformation: Strategy and Community Engagement—2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Several issues, processes, and developments shape the context in which smart cities and smart villages—and thus, also the corresponding research agenda and policy-making process—pragmatize. The frame for these developments is most profoundly shaped by the imperatives entailed in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda, in the set of the UN-driven “AI for Good” initiatives, and, in the broader sense, by the global digital transformation that sweeps across diverse issues, levels, and domains of the social reality and the policy-making process.

Against this backdrop, this Special Issue (SI) of Sustainability will focus on the most recent advances in smart cities and smart villages research to encourage, nourish, and promote the development of strategies conducive to smart cities’/villages’ sustainable growth and development in times of the global digital transformation. The key objectives of this SI are (i) to examine how advances in sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT) broaden the range of opportunities to develop sustainable development strategies for smart cities and smart villages at local, regional, and global levels and across issue areas; (ii) to identify the ways, methods, and strategies by means of which a variety of stakeholders (can) engage in the processes of co-creating and making smart cities and smart villages thrive, and how ICT weighs in these processes; (iii) to reflect on and to add to the interpretive lens and explanatory potential that are offered by the existing literature on the subject; (iv) to query whether best practice sharing and specific business and policy strategies might be helpful in boosting smart cities’ and smart villages’ sustainability and development.

Dr. Anna Visvizi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• global digital transformation and smart cities research
• global digital transformation and smart villages research
• “AI for good” and smart city/smart village development
• smart city/villages and the UN’s SDGs
• ICT and community engagement in smart city/village development
• ICT and the digital transition of cities/villages into smart city/smart village
• challenges, caveats and problems relating to smart cities/villages development and functioning
• smart cities/villages in the era of platform economy
• smart cities/villages, competitiveness and economic growth
• ICT and the provision services in smart cities/villages, e.g. healthcare, education, etc.
• energy communities and smart cities/villages
• data cooperatives and smart cities/villages
• smart city strategy and community enegagement
• smart village and community engagement
• services provision and community engagement in smart city/village context
• smart cities/villages in the global south/north contexts

• Smart Cities and Smart Villages and the Global Digital Transformation: Strategy and Community Engagement in Sustainability (14 articles)