From Planning Cities to Sustaining Communities: Smart and Sustainable Urban Strategies for the Post-carbon Transition in the Gulf States

The achievement of smart urbanism and sustainable urbanism is one of the more prominent themes of the research on urban planning worldwide. Smart sustainable cities (SSCs) are rapidly impacting global debates about the future prospects of urban development. Despite several instances of the characteristics of a smart or sustainable city, a precise definition and a theoretical framework remain lacking. An analysis of regional development plans and city layout reveals that large-scale development will continue in an unsustainable manner. The current trends indicate that infrastructure planning in the cities of the Arabian Gulf must be reoriented towards compact, linked and people-centric characteristics as well as low-carbon infrastructure (UN Habitat in Smart sustainable cities and smart digital solutions for urban resilience in the Arab region: Lessons from the pandemic, 2021). The governments of the Gulf states are confronted with major obstacles due to a projected increase in population and significant reliance on hydrocarbon energy sources. Gulf cities are at the forefront of increasing demand and pressure on critical resources, such as electricity, food and water, which results in a substantial carbon footprint on the environment. In the Gulf region, SSCs emerge as a potential answer to concerns associated with resilience and sustainability, which also emerge due to the unprecedented rate of urbanisation. SSCs are designed to deliver a succession of intelligent solutions for mitigating the economic, social and environmental effects of urban issues (UN Habitant, 2021). This chapter presents a framework for sustainable urbanism by integrating concepts derived from several disciplines. This knowledge-based approach integrates the multidimensional domain knowledge of urban sustainability to produce a comprehensive road map. Given that smart and sustainable urbanism incorporates elements derived from society, technology, policy and the environment, this integration is relatively complex. The proposed framework can contribute to an informed and well-defined understanding of problems faced by cities in the Gulf nations as they strive to achieve sustainable urbanism with a low-carbon footprint.