Investigating social factors of sustainability in a smart city

Sustainability is an established goal of future urban developments. More recently, the smart city concept has been employed to address issues associated with negative environmental externalities. Topics associated to people and communities, in the content of smart cities, have been neglected on the expense of a deeper understanding of the technological aspect of smart. This paper focuses on filling this gap by exploring its significance of sustainability and describing the interactions of these two concepts. This paper thus provides a particular conceptual focus on the potential of smart city strategies for improving the social sustainability of cities. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.