Autorentext

Nicos Komninos is a professor of Urban Development and Innovation Policy and director of URENIO Research, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Klappentext

There is growing global interest in understanding how digital technologies and physical spaces, particularly within the framework of digital and green agendas, can transform cities, influence behaviour, and stimulate innovation. This book advances a novel and interdisciplinary framework for understanding intelligent environments, grounded in the concept of connected intelligence, the integration of human, collective, and machine intelligence.

It explores how this integration operates within real-world smart ecosystems to drive transformative innovations in sustainability, carbon neutrality, urban efficiency, and liveability. Departing from approaches that treat intelligent systems as purely technological constructs, such as urban Artificial Intelligence (AI), cyber-physical infrastructure, digital twins, and machine learning vision, it reframes intelligent environments as socio-technical systems that remain fundamentally human-centric, even in the age of AI. It distinguishes itself from existing smart city literature, which often isolates digital technologies and IoT infrastructures for cities, by offering a comprehensive investigation of smart ecosystems as digital-institutional-physical (DIP) spaces; an analysis of real-world environments where connected intelligence is enacted, including industrial sectors evolving into smart-green ecosystems, platform services augmented by generative AI, carbon-neutral residential districts; and the development of a universal architecture of connected intelligence, applicable across diverse ecosystems.

By bridging theory and practice and integrating technological, institutional, and territorial perspectives, the book introduces a conceptual and practical lens to understand how smart ecosystems enable ongoing transformative innovations that are reshaping the near future of cities and regions. It offers insights into how smart cities are evolving into intelligent environments and will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students of innovation systems, smart city planning, urban, transportation and environmental planning, governance, computer science, and engineering.

Inhalt

1. Foundations for Intelligent Environments: Smart Ecosystems, Connected Intelligence, Transformative Innovations Part 1. The Rise of Smart Ecosystems 2. Smart Ecosystems: Systems-of-Systems Reshape Cities and Innovation 3. Smart Ecosystems in the Near Future: Foresight and Evolution Part 2. Transformative Innovations and Transition Models 4. Industry Sectors: Transitioning into Smart Green Ecosystems 5. Service Ecosystems: Platforms in the Age of Generative AI 6. Residential Areas: Towards Self-Sufficient Net-Zero Energy Districts 7. Mobility Ecosystems: Transformative Innovations for Car-free Cities 8. Interconnected Innovation Ecosystems: Combining Capabilities across DIP spaces Part 3. Actualising Connected Intelligence 9. Connected Intelligence: A Universal Architecture across Smart Ecosystems 10. Actualising Connected Intelligence in the Discovery of Innovation