Page 208 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

The Role of Smart City Approach in
Sustainable Urban Planning Processes

The role of information and communication technologies, which are used
significantly in sustainable urban development processes, is significant in
terms of highlighting the strengths of urban systems and providing significant
advantages to smart cities in a competitive environment. The main issues that
come to the fore in this context can be listed as follows (Thamarux et al., 2017;
Meechang, 2020):
• Following the sustainable development practices carried out in many
countries,
• Providing opportunities for reducing inequalities,
• Local governments being more transparent and accountable to their
citizens,
• Allowing the citizens having an idea of their cities,
• Participation of citizens in decision-making and policy-making
processes more actively,
• Allowing the citizens developing new services in accordance with the
expectations,
• Increasing the opportunities to access to urban equipment,
• Improving production processes and making them more efficient,
• Reduction of different risk factors in the physical environment,
• Implementation of effective disaster management and early warning
systems.

Conclusion and Evaluation
In 21st century, urban norms are being questioned while the phenomenon of
urbanization is being discussed through development activities at the global and
local levels without unlinking it from the smart city context. The first application
realised in this scope was the use of urban infrastructure supported by the
ICT. In the following periods, smart cities have become an important source of
motivation in terms of urban development processes. New concepts revealed by
the smart city approach are frequently encountered both in academic literature
and in application examples of different disciplines. These concepts include big
data, open data, social capital, creativity, smart society, etc.
It is expected that spatial quality and efficiency will increase at the same
rate, if the planning, design and management processes of smart cities are
carried out together with the urban residents. These processes, which will be
carried out with the participation and cooperation of all stakeholders in the
city, are mainly based on ICT and data analytics. With the smart city approach,
a human-oriented approach comes to the fore on the scale of urban planning,

Year 2 / Issue 3 / January 2023 193