Affluent Cities and Digitalization: A Bidirectional Approach in 404 Cities

Introduction

Cities are experimenting huge tensions due to the unprecedent population growth and its consequences in the urban contexts (Vardoulakis & Kinney, 2019). The urban population growth pushes cities to the limit (Marans, 2015) as it generally involves higher population concentration which might be translated into resources collapse and sustainability-related issues (Sodiq et al., 2019). Indeed, research highlights that these issues are likely to involve negative impacts on urban features such as the environment degradation, worse quality of life, or citizens or place health menaces (Gupta et al., 2019; Martínez-Bravo & Martínez-del-Río, 2019; Paiva-Vianna et al., 2015). For instance, population concentration in cities and the consequent economic activities are associated with air quality degradation which is highly related to health issues (Díaz et al., 2020; Di et al., 2017) because air pollution causes approximately seven million deaths per year and is responsible of one third of stroke, lung cancer, and heart disease related deaths (WHO, 2020). In this context, urban sustainability and city livability have been signaled as two of the grand societal challenges of the current century (e.g., Vardoulakis and Kinney, 2019). Governments aim to address those pressing issues through different strategies among which digitalization stands out because it has the potential of positively enhancing sustainability (Helbing, 2012, Heemsbergen, 2016, Seele & Lock, 2017) and importantly rising efficiency (Sodiq et al., 2019). Not only are policy and decision makers increasingly been interested in digitalization, but also a growing stream of research is advocating the digitalization of cities as the solution for the current urban challenges (e.g., Bibri & Krogstie, 2017).

Digitalization has the ability of changing peoples’ lifestyles and the way cities are governed (Seele & Lock, 2017) and has been associated with a myriad of benefits for urban contexts such as prosperity, effectiveness, and competitiveness (e.g., Ahvenniemi et al., 2017). First, scholars have outlined digitalization as a tool for optimizing urban planning and architectural design (Fertner et al., 2019) which might lead to better connectivity infrastructure and efficiency gains in terms of building management or resource use (Balogun et al., 2020). Second, research highlights that proper digitalization levels entail the possibility of gathering higher-quality data (Balogun et al., 2020) that could be afterwards used for governance purposes in terms of policy or decision-making. For example, Balogun et al. (2020) highlighted the possibility of using the data gathered thanks to digitalization for improving cities resiliency and diminishing their vulnerability against climate risks. Third, scholars also highlighted benefits for citizens because, thanks to effective digitalization, they might be offered greater possibilities of spatial and temporal conditions for engaging in urban activities (Lyons et al., 2018) because digitalization offers greater flexibility (Seele & Lock, 2017). For instance, they could take advantage of digital connectivity for socially and economically engage in society’s life (Alexander et al, 2011).