Planning Support for Smart Cities in the Post-COVID Era

Abstract

The need for smart cities has been dramatically altered due to the COVID-19 crisis. Information and communications technology (ICT) were critical amid the crisis outburst (contact tracing, health informatics, and remote service provisions), and will remain critical in the post-COVID-19 world where physical contacts are discouraged and replaced by remote working and online meetings (James et al., 2020). Smart city technologies, originally a “fashionable” branding strategy for ambitious cities, have become bread-and-butter infrastructures to support post-pandemic daily lives and work. The urgent need for smart cities expedited endeavors of equipping urban governance with these technologies, which make urban planners increasingly skeptical about how smart cities are planned, who plans them, and for whom they are planned (Jiang et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021). Planning Support Systems (PSS) were once widely discussed in the literature of planning for smart cities, as they share common technical features including dashboards, largescale models, communication tools, and data systems. However, none of these technologies guarantee citizens’ equitable, inclusive, and sustainable access to smart cities. Two issues are associated with this—process and access. The process focuses on whether PSS can reinvent a governance model that plans along and even builds PSS from scratch together with outside partners and citizens (Barns, 2018). To realize broader collaboration in the process, access should be available through various channels including workshops, open-source web pages, and even smart phones (Lin and Benneker, 2021). This special issue, “Planning Support for Smart and Sustainable Cities” was first planned in November 2019, a time when the world did not have any idea about COVID-19, and it is published in 2022, when urban society has been completely re-shaped by COVID-19. The articles in this issue were either drafted, submitted, or revised amid the most difficult times of the crisis. Our special issue has seven accepted articles, which provide reflections on the unprecedented challenges, demands, and opportunities for smart cities and PSSs.