Editorial: Smart cities in the making

Over the past decade smart urban technologies have begun to blanket our cities, forming the backbone of a large intelligent infrastructure. Along with this development, dissemination of the sustainability ideology has had a significant imprint on the planning and development of our cities. Consequently, the concept of smart cities has become a popular topic particularly for scholars, urban planners, urban administrations, urban development and real-estate companies, and corporate technology firms. The concept of smart city is relatively new and can be seen as a successor of information city, digital city, intelligent city, sustainable city, and knowledge city. Despite the overwhelming popularity of this notion, there is still a lack of consensus on what a smart city is. In general, this new city brand is understood as an urban locality that makes use of information and communication technology extensively to provide a high quality of living to its citizens. The term smart city is also used as an umbrella concept that contains a number of sub-themes such as smart urbanism, smart economy, sustainable and smart environment, smart technology, smart energy, smart mobility, smart living, and so on