Smart Cities and Digitized Urban Management

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to reside in cities and urban agglomerations (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014). Cities have always showcased the best and the worst aspects of humanity – gleaming skyscrapers, art, and inventiveness on the one hand; slums, crime, and abject poverty on the other. Such challenges, which cities already face, will be further amplified by increasing urbanization, and it will be coastal cities in particular that bear the brunt of the global threat of climate change. Not without reason is the quest for “Sustainable Cities and Communities” one of the UN’s explicit sustainable development goals (United Nations 2015).