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This paper delves into the rapidly progressing 15-Minute City concept, an innovative urban planning model that envisions a city where residents can access essential services and amenities within a 15-min walk or bike ride from their homes. Endorsed by UN-Habitat as a critical strategy for sustainable urban regeneration, this concept has gained considerable worldwide recognition since its introduction in 2016. The 15-Minute City framework aims to enhance accessibility, sustainability, and social cohesion by emphasizing mixed-use development, compact urban design, and efficient transportation systems. Nevertheless, the swift expansion of this concept has surpassed the production of academic literature on the topic, leading to a knowledge gap that calls for alternative research methodologies. To address this gap, our paper adopts a mixed-method approach, systematically analyzing the scholarly literature, gray literature, media articles, and policy documents to offer a holistic understanding of the 15-Minute City concept, its real-world application, and the primary principles embraced by policymakers. By investigating the various manifestations of the 15-Minute City model and its potential advantages, challenges, and implications for urban planning and policy, this paper contributes to the ongoing conversation on sustainable urban development and planning. Through this study, we aim to inform policymakers, urban planners, and researchers about the current state of the 15-Minute City movement and its possible future trajectory.

This paper investigates the critical intersection of urban climate policy and public health, emphasizing the pressing need for integrated strategies to address the intertwined challenges of climate change and health in urban settings. Despite cities being central to global emissions and energy consumption, a significant gap exists in the incorporation of health considerations into urban climate strategies, as evidenced by the analysis of urban content in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The paper highlights the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP) initiative and the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report as pivotal moments for integrating climate and health agendas. However, it also points out the underwhelming response from cities in adopting comprehensive climate strategies, which undermines potential public health benefits. With substantial investments required to bridge the gap in health-focused climate resilience, the paper calls for a redefined approach to urban climate policy. This approach should prioritize health outcomes, leverage opportunities like the 15-Minute City concept, and foster the development of infrastructures that support both climate resilience and public health. The upcoming NDC revision cycle is identified as a critical opportunity for embedding health imperatives into urban climate strategies, emphasizing the need for a holistic perspective that views urban areas as ecosystems where climate and health are intricately connected. This comprehensive view aims to promote policies that are mutually reinforcing, thus contributing to healthier, more livable cities.

Abstract The emerging phenomenon of platformization has given rise to what has been termed "platform society,“ a digitally connected world where platforms have penetrated the heart of urban societies—transforming social practices, disrupting social interactions and market relations, and affecting democratic processes. One of the recent manifestations of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform whose data infrastructures, governance models, and economic processes are predicted to penetrate different urban sectors and spheres of urban life. The Metaverse is an idea of a hypothetical set of “parallel virtual worlds” that incarnate ways of living in believably virtual cities as an alternative to future data-driven smart cities. However, this idea has already raised concerns over what constitutes the global architecture of computer mediation underlying the Metaverse with regard to different forms of social life as well as social order. This study analyzes the core emerging trends enabling and driving data-driven smart cities and uses the outcome to devise a novel framework for the digital and computing processes underlying the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities. Further, it examines and discusses the risks and impacts of the Metaverse, paying particular attention to: platformization; the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing non-spontaneous "normality" of social order; corporate-led technocratic governance; governmentality; privacy, security, and trust; and data governance. A thematic analysis approach is adopted to cope with the vast body of literature of various disciplinarities. The analysis identifies five digital and computing processes related to data-driven smart cities: digital instrumentation, digital hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization. The novelty of the framework derived based on thematic analysis lies in its essential processual digital and computing components and the way in which these are structured and integrated given their clear synergies as to enabling the functioning of the Metaverse towards potentially virtual cities. This study highlights how and why the identified digital and computing processes—as intricately interwoven with the entirety of urban ways of living—arouse contentions and controversies pertaining to society’ public values. As such, it provides new insights into understanding the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the other dimensions of society. Accordingly, it contributes to the scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) by highlighting the societal and ethical implications of the platformization of urban societies through the Metaverse.

Abstract Recent advances in computing and immersive technologies have provided Meta (formerly Facebook) with the opportunity to leapfrog or expedite its way of thinking and devising a global computing platform called the “Metaverse”. This hypothetical 3D network of virtual spaces is increasingly shaping alternatives to the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, as it represents ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. At the heart of the Metaverse is a computational understanding of human users’ cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior that reduces the experience of everyday life to logic and calculative rules and procedures. This implies that human users become more knowable and manageable and their behavior more predictable and controllable, thereby serving as passive data points feeding the AI and analytics system that they have no interchange with or influence on. This paper examines the forms, practices, and ethics of the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities, paying particular attention to: privacy, surveillance capitalism, dataveillance, geosurveillance, human health and wellness, and collective and cognitive echo-chambers. Achieving this aim will provide the answer to the main research question driving this study: What ethical implications will the Metaverse have on the experience of everyday life in post-pandemic urban society? In terms of methodology, this paper deploys a thorough review of the current status of the Metaverse, urban informatics, urban science, and data-driven smart cities literature, as well as trends, research, and developments. We argue that the Metaverse will do more harm than good to human users due to the massive misuse of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization underlying the associated global architecture of computer mediation. It follows that the Metaverse needs to be re-cast in ways that re-orientate in how users are conceived; recognize their human characteristics; and take into account the moral values and principles designed to realize the benefits of socially disruptive technologies while mitigating their pernicious effects. This paper contributes to the academic debates in the emerging field of data-driven smart urbanism by highlighting the ethical implications posed by the Metaverse as speculative fiction that illustrates the concerns raised by the pervasive and massive use of advanced technologies in data-driven smart cities. In doing so, it seeks to aid policy-makers in better understanding the pitfalls of the Metaverse and their repercussions upon the wellbeing of human users and the core values of urban society. It also stimulates prospective research and further critical perspectives on this timely topic.

Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.

The Metaverse, as a gigantic ecosystem application enabled mainly by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the IoT, Big Data, and Extended Reality (XR) technologies, represents an idea of a hypothetical "parallel virtual environment" that incarnates ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. It is increasingly seen as a transition from smart cities to virtual cities and a new target for city governments to attain “new” goals. However, the Metaverse project was launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis purported to be a rare opportunity that should be seized to reset and reimagine the world—though mainly in regard to its digital incarnation, and what this entails in terms of both cementing and normalizing the corporate-led, top-down, technocratic, tech-mediated, algorithmic mode of governance, as well as new forms of controlling ways of living in urban society. The “new normal” has already set the stage for undemocratically resetting and unilaterally reimagining the world, resulting in an abrupt large-scale digital transformation of urban society, a process of digitization and digitalization that is in turn paving the way for a new era of merging virtuality and urbanity. This has raised serious concerns over the risks and impacts of the surveillance technologies that have been rapidly and massively deployed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These concerns also relate to the global architecture of the computer mediation of the Metaverse upon which the logic of surveillance capitalism depends, and which is constituted by control and commodification mechanisms that seek to monitor, predict, control, and trade the behavior of human users, as well as to exile them from their own. This viewpoint paper explores and questions the Metaverse from the prism of the social and economic logic of surveillance capitalism, focusing on how and why the practices of the post-pandemic governance of urban society are bound to be undemocratic and unethical. The novelty of the viewpoint lies in providing new insights into understanding the dark side of the ostensible fancier successor of the Internet of today, thereby its value and contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). In addition, by shedding light on the emergence of the Metaverse as a computing platform, the viewpoint seeks to help policymakers understand and assess the ramifications of its wide adoption, as well as to help users make informed decisions about its usage in everyday activity—if it actualizes.

Mobility is a subject of increasing importance in a time when cities have gained prominence, as they are home to over 56% of the world’s population and generate over 80% of global GDP. Urban planning principles have traditionally been developed to promote urban efficiency and enhance productivity. The emergence of ‘Smart Mobility’ has provided researchers and policy practitioners new ways to understand and plan cities. With rapid urbanization growth and the sustained mobility challenges faced in most global cities, this paper sets forth to understand and map the evolution of the concept of ‘Smart Urban Mobility’ through a bibliometric analysis and science mapping techniques using VOSviewer. In total, 6079 articles were retrieved from the Web of Science database over 5 decades, from 1968 to 2021, and divided into four sub-periods, namely 1968 to 2010, 2011 to 2015, 2016 to 2019, and 2020 to 2021. The paper provides a better understanding of the thematic focus and associated trends of smart mobility beyond technical issues related to Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), where due to diverse dynamics, such as unprecedented growth and advancement in technologies, attention has extended to incorporating the impacts of the application of different technologies in urban mobility as well as associated fields. This paper further identifies major sources, authors, publications, and countries that have made more contributions to the development of this field. The findings of this study can help researchers better understand the evolution of the subject, and help policymakers make better-informed decisions on investable infrastructures for better mobility outcomes in urban regeneration pursuits and future cities.

Numerous urban models are emerging in response to climate urgencies, as pointed out in COP26, resulting in a call for urgent and deep decarbonization policies. One emerging model, responsive to the need for more sustainable urban outcomes, is that of the ‘15-Minute City’. The quest for more sustainable and smarter cities is urgent, as cities contribute more than 60% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and thus demands a redefinition of some contemporary urban policies, especially around mobility. The ‘15-Minute City’ is an emerging concept, currently in application in major European Cities, such as Paris and Barcelona, and quickly gaining popularity as a potent solution for encouraging urban sustainability transitions. As the model approaches urban planning via humane socio-economic dimensions, it can be further developed to benefit urban communities, globally in an equitable fashion. In doing so, the model can be crafted to respond to the challenges of the other geographies, including those of the Global South, specifically relating to urban infrastructural financing. This approach recognizes the need for models that can contribute to deep decarbonization agendas, while being contextually responsive with sound financial mechanisms—including both Public and Private parties. In this paper, we argue that the ’15-Minute City’ concept can be poised as a potent solution to re-structure cities for increased sustainability, inclusivity, and economic equity, through locally implemented fiscal mechanisms.

Abstract Since the 19th century, rapid urbanisation coupled with a demographic boom has increased pressures on the global exploitation of natural resources leading to an array of issues at planetary scale. Even though there have been significant ecologically driven human policy efforts, with frameworks addressing ecosystem accounting and management, such are principally constricted at sub-global levels; being regionally focussed, and hence lacking both cohesivity and accountability. Resource management viewed through this lens leads to a number of geopolitical factors as demonstrated recently with the Amazon Forest fires. This incident witnessed calls from numerous countries calling for rapid remediation even though their own policies are harbingers of equally damaging the environments through other means. This disparity in resource accounting and management on a planetary scale is apparent from diverse local and regional groups and needs to be addressed in order to sustain a truly sustainable and liveable ecosystem and their failures in realising a viable ecosystem accounting system. This perspective paper explores this theme and proposes a ‘Global Planetary Ecosystem Accounting’ system based on the principle that ecologically sensitive areas benefiting the global ecosystem need to be economically weighted and its preservation equated to a revenue-generating activity.

Research on climate change has increased significantly since the 1970s. There has also been a particular focus on Africa, given its vulnerability to climate change impacts and its urbanization trends that may have massive implications for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Despite the wealth of publications on climate change in Africa, there is a lack of review studies that highlight the overall research landscape. If this status of climate research is clarified, African countries can better deal with climate change. Hence, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the status and trends of research on climate change adaptation and mitigation in Africa. Our review, straddling from 1990 to late 2021, recognizes the foundations that underpin climate change adaptation and mitigation literature. Based on keywords associated with Africa's climate change adaptation and mitigation, we undertook bibliometric research by collecting 3,316 related SCI/SSCI articles. In addition, we provided a thematic evolution over three decades, compartmentalized into four sub-periods (1990–2007; 2008–2014; 2015–2019; 2020–2021). Priority research topics and themes have been dynamic over time, with some core concepts receiving more attention (vulnerability, food, water, and energy security). Although the number of published articles exhibited a rapidly growing trend, their distribution is extremely uneven. Articles were mainly published by institutions from certain parts of the continent, with the University of Cape Town, making the highest contribution. About 72% of the existing studies focused on climate change adaptation, while climate change mitigation was less represented with 22%. The results also showed that researchers have examined not all African countries. South Africa, Ethiopia, and Ghana are hot spots, while most countries are largely neglected. Africa and African countries need to improve their future research ability on climate change mitigation. Assessing climate change risks and measures in African countries should be prioritized.

The autonomous vehicle (AVs) market is expanding at a rapid pace due to the advancement of information, communication, and sensor technology applications, offering a broad range of opportunities in terms of energy efficiency and addressing climate change concerns and safety. With regard to this last point, the rate of reduction in accidents is considerable when switching safety control tasks to machines from humans, which can be noted as having significantly slower response rates. This paper explores this thematic by focusing on the safety of AVs by thorough analysis of previously collected AV crash statistics and further discusses possible solutions for achieving increased autonomous vehicle safety. To achieve this, this technical paper develops a dynamic run-time safe assessment system, using the standard autonomous drive system (ADS), which is developed and simulated in case studies further in the paper. OpenCV methods for lane detection are developed and applied as robust control frameworks, which introduces the factor of vehicle crash predictability for the ego vehicle. The developed system is made to predict possible crashes by using a combination of machine learning and neural network methods, providing useful information for response mechanisms in risk scenarios. In addition, this paper explores the operational design domain (ODD) of the AV’s system and provides possible solutions to extend the domain in order to render vehicle operationality, even in safe mode. Additionally, three case studies are explored to supplement a discussion on the implementation of algorithms aimed at increasing curved lane detection ability and introducing trajectory predictability of neighbouring vehicles for an ego vehicle, resulting in lower collisions and increasing the safety of the AV overall. This paper thus explores the technical development of autonomous vehicles and is aimed at researchers and practitioners engaging in the conceptualisation, design, and implementation of safer AV systems focusing on lane detection and expanding AV safe state domains and vehicle trajectory predictability.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has come of age, and complex solutions can now be implemented seamlessly within urban governance and management frameworks and processes. For cities, growing rates of car ownership are rendering parking availability a challenge and lowering the quality of life through increased carbon emissions. The development of smart parking solutions is thus necessary to reduce the time spent looking for parking and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The principal role of this research paper is to analyze smart parking solutions from a technical perspective, underlining the systems and sensors that are available, as documented in the literature. The review seeks to provide comprehensive insights into the building of smart parking solutions. A holistic survey of the current state of smart parking systems should incorporate the classification of such systems as big vehicular detection technologies. Finally, communication modules are presented with clarity.

The diversion and recovery of organic waste are one of the most significant opportunities and challenges for reducing the environmental impacts of waste disposal internationally, as recognised by the United Nations’ SDG 12 that seeks to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. This issue is particularly pertinent to developed countries, like Australia, who have a high propensity for waste removal arising from their industrial and domestic use of products, materials and organic consumables. Through the use of GIS technology, using modelling software developed by the Global Methane Initiative, a series of simulations were undertaken to determine the viability of an anaerobic digester for the City of Greater Geelong (COGG), located in the State of Victoria (Australia), where organic materials constitute over 25% of all waste land-filled. Using only municipal organic waste, the modelling concluded that the COGG would generate between AU$6M-AU$11M/annum from the sale of biogas/methane. In addition to this revenue stream, COGG would have an Annual Projected Net Emissions Reductions of 3797 Mt. This paper further considers the development of a geospatial database to identify and locate concentrated organic waste resources in COGG, the design and development of a software tool to help quantify the production of food waste, and the development of an economic model to value the organic waste stream of COGG arising from the implementation of this proposal.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) has been well studied for flood prediction. However, there is not enough empirical evidence to generalize ANN applicability to small countries with microclimates prevailing in a small geographical space. In this paper, we focus on the climatic conditions of Mauritius for which we seek to investigate the accuracy of using ANN to predict flooding using locally collected data from 11 meteorological stations spread across the country. The ANN model for flood prediction presented in this work is trained using 20,000 climate data records, collected over a period of two years for Mauritius. Our input climate features are minimum temperature, maximum temperature, rainfall and humidity and our output decision is „flood‟ or „no flood‟. Using ANN, we achieved an accuracy of 98% for flood prediction and hence, we conclude that ANN is indeed a good predictor for flood occurrence even for regions with predominantly microclimatic conditions.

The authors wish to make the following corrections to their paper [...]

The social media live-broadcasted murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officers in the United States ignited a national uprising as it highlighted continued discrimination of the African-American community. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, this fuelled the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and gave way to protests of an unprecedented scale causing havoc in major cities in the United States, with losses tabled in both the public and private sectors. Interestingly, this momentum kindled similar protests in numerous cities in other parts of the world calling for racial equality for minority and Indigenous groups and a more equitable presentation of their culturally colonised stories. This paper surveys this global uprising exploring its precipitous momentum at a time where most of the world was in lockdown or in forced confinement. Included is how the protests, highlighting deep-rooted underlying social and cultural angst, may have far-reaching impacts in influencing post-pandemic recovery mechanisms in favour of more inclusive communities - a goal ironically embedded in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 that seeks to ‘Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’.

This perspective paper explores the rising impacts of the COVID-19 and the Russia–Ukraine war from different perspectives, with an emphasis on the role of climate financing in achieving equitable and just transition mechanisms and that of peace in expediting this pursuit and sustaining this drive. It is motivated by the realization that there is an urgent need for accelerating the decarbonisation agenda, as highlighted in pre-COP26 debates and in the resulting Glasgow Climate Pact, through the mitigation measures that can be unpacked at both cost and scale. This is further reiterated in the third instalment of Assessment Report 6 (AR6) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, dwelling on Mitigation of Climate Change, underlining the required policy shifts and technology developmental needs. Green technology, however, comes at a green premium, being more expensive to implement in geographies that cannot absorb its cost in the immediate short term. This engenders an inequitable and unjust landscape, as those that require green technology are unable to have access to it but are most often on the frontlines of the impacts of climate change. While it is urgent to review this issue and to encourage more cooperation for technology development and transfer, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war are posing mounting challenges for achieving these objectives. These two crises are causing an unprecedented rise in commodities and labour pricing, with further knock-on impacts on global supply chains for technology. This is in turn rendering green technology unattainable for developing and less developed countries and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

Conventional and emerging paradigms of urbanism require new responses under the current circumstances, especially in relation to the integration of sustainability dimensions and technology advances. The escalating rate of urbanization, coupled with the climate emergency, fundamentally indeed disrupt the challenges that urbanism research and practice deal with, calling for adopting more innovative approaches to urban planning and design. With cities contributing around 65% of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and experiencing an unprecedented growth of population, contemporary urban policy needs to be redefined and re-assessed accordingly. While numerous urban models, such as the Compact City, the Eco-City, the Sustainable City, and the Smart City, have emerged in response to the challenges of sustainability and urbanization, the 15-Minute City has recently gained a steep popularity. This paper explores the theoretical, practical, and technological foundations of the 15-Minute City, with a particular focus on the proximity dimension of mixed land-use and its environmental, social, and economic benefits of sustainability as supported by smart technologies. We argue that this evolving model of urbanism has the potential to gain more expansion and success in regard to building more sustainable, efficient, resilient, equitable, and inclusive cities in line with the global agendas of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, as it adds a strategic value to the amalgam of the prevailing and emerging paradigms of urbanism and their synergies with respect to increasing the benefits of sustainability while emphasizing its environmental dimension.

The ‘15-minute city’ concept is emerging as a potent urban regeneration model in post-pandemic cities, offering new vantage points on liveability and urban health. While the concept is primarily geared towards rethinking urban morphologies, it can be furthered via the adoption of Smart Cities network technologies to provide tailored pathways to respond to contextualised challenges through the advent of data mining and processing to better inform urban decision-making processes. We argue that the ‘15-minute city’ concept can value-add from Smart City network technologies in particular through Digital Twins, Internet of Things (IoT), and 6G. The data gathered by these technologies, and processed via Machine Learning techniques, can unveil new patterns to understand the characteristics of urban fabrics. Collectively, those dimensions, unpacked to support the ‘15-minute city’ concept, can provide new opportunities to redefine agendas to better respond to economic and societal needs as well as align more closely with environmental commitments, including the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. This perspective paper presents new sets of opportunities for cities arguing that these new connectivities should be explored now so that appropriate protocols can be devised and so that urban agendas can be recalibrated to prepare for upcoming technology advances, opening new pathways for urban regeneration and resilience crafting.

While the topic of climate change is of global importance and has global consequences, the context is far more dangerous for emerging economies, including small island developing states (SIDS) and their coastal cities. The literature supports the need for robustness in infrastructural dimensions of such economies. However, the preparatory economic aspects have been overlooked in favour of post-impact disaster management studies by many countries. The latter studies have also focused upon the need for heavy financial investments without investigating solutions for economic strengthening of those economies including climate change mitigation and affordability. As such, emerging SIDS economies have struggled to meet these obligations from their internal finances that draw predominantly from tax revenue sources and foreign aid thereby often leading to increased debts contributing to economic austerity and decreasing liveability levels when repayment commitments fail. Public-private partnerships (PPP), another sought-after loan strategy, which often attracts foreign direct investment (FDI), can work if PPPs are carefully designed within strict public monitoring criteria. However, their applicability needs to be expanded to include the wider social strata of a city to ensure inclusivity and cohesiveness, and formulated to contribute to a wider urban regeneration agenda. This paper proposes a more inclusive framework bridging governance with drivers for sustainable development, using urban heritage and culture as a strategic thread for debt repayment and economic empowerment through PPP. This paper seeks to inform policymakers on sustainable pathways as it relates to SIDS cultural heritage conservation policies and practices towards better economic resilience in the wake of climate change.

The rapid rise in urbanization internationally is both driving and stressing our consumption patterns, including that of land use. Urban sprawl is arguably one of the most important threats to human and nature biodiversity given its reliance upon fossil fuel exploitation and consumption. The need for increasing the density of cities is required to contain urban expansion in land size. However, while the footprint density of cities is increasing, vacant plots are prized and rare in most urban areas. Tradable air rights development is seen as a potential solution to provide developers the option of increasing density while encouraging an emerging urban economy. However, the price speculation of air rights is a danger and counter to a fair and inclusive real estate market. This paper proposes a new model that encourages the trading of time-sensitive air rights through Smart Contracts in the Blockchain as a means of prevention against urban sprawl.

Cotonou is the largest city and main economic centre of the nation of Benin, Africa. Following independence, the city has experienced major population growth resulting in the extensive development of slums on flood plains and marshes causing the loss of biodiversity of these fragile ecosystems. Infrastructural development, unable to keep pace with informal settlement development, and a cumbersome municipal service system, have led to the illegal dumping of organic and plastic wastes, and extensive land pollution. In addition, due to its primary dune coastal location, Cotonou is facing sea level rise risks demonstrating the urgent need to sustainably address urban development. Through a socio-technical framework, this paper considers the use of transformed plastic wastes as new settlement building blocks to reduce solid waste, create jobs, and develop low-cost housing. This new strategy offers employment empowerment and a strategy to generate an income of US$2,380,000 per annum and the creation of 3200 permanent jobs.