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The science of cities has been gathering steady momentum in recent decades, in terms of both further academic research and in a more professional setting (e.g. urban design and infrastructure management), giving us a better understanding of the elements and dynamics that favour quality urban planning. By analysing empirically the cause-effect relationships between factors such as urban morphology and topology, density, entropy, fractality, or the underlying patterns for distributing uses in a territory [?], we uncover universal patterns that we can then use to analyse and improve our decision-making in the field of urban planning. By better understanding the underlying characteristics of an urban planning system we can establish a legal and regulatory framework through which we can identify what we can do to potentially transform the nature of the structural characteristics of the networks that systematically affect our lives. By integrating art and science into city design and urban planning, we can tailor design and decision-making to each city and cultural context and consciously shape our cities in a way that subtly but surely contributes to unleashing society's greatest latent forces, thus enhancing quality of life and creating freer, more equal and more prosperous communities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to analyze the role of digital planning tools implemented in the context of sustainable development in the Global South, considering that public governance has been going through an important pivotal moment since the appearance of globalization and digitalization, where collaborative participation and hybrid approaches are becoming indispensable for planning and development. In this sense, the paper will give a brief introduction of governance in the digital Era and the use of GIS-based digital planning tools, followed by the presentation of the case study of TOSCA, or Toolkit for Sustainable City Planning and Analysis, to understand the relevance of this hybridization between human and digital processes for governance and planning. TOSCA will be presented in the context of two pilot projects, with the development and deployment of the technology between 2019 and 2020, summarizing its process and outcomes from the stakeholder perspective. The discussion chapter of this paper, collects the learnings and challenges gained during this first application of the Toolkit, and points towards the future development and its application in other regions, with the aim of understanding how its conceptualization and development could be further enhanced in order to ensure its sustainable take-up under diverse contexts and use cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the need and opportunities for constructively combining different types of (analogue and data-driven) knowledges in evidence-informed policy decision-making in future smart cities. Problematizing the assumed universality and objectivity of data-driven knowledge, we call attention to notions of “positionality” and “situatedness” in knowledge production relating to the urban present and possible futures. In order to illustrate our arguments, we draw on a case study of strategic urban (spatial) planning in the Cambridge city region in the United Kingdom. Tracing diverse knowledge production processes, including top-down data-driven knowledges derived from urban modeling, and bottom-up analogue community-based knowledges, allows us to identify locationally specific knowledge politics around evidence for policy. The findings highlight how evidence-informed urban policy can benefit from political processes of competition, contestation, negotiation, and complementarity that arise from interactions between diverse “digital” and “analogue” knowledges. We argue that studying such processes can help in assembling a more multifaceted, diverse and inclusive knowledge-base on which to base policy decisions, as well as to raise awareness and improve active participation in the ongoing “smartification” of cities.