Urban sustainability and smartness understanding (USSU)-identifying influencing factors: A systematic review

Urban Sustainability and Smartness Understanding (USSU) can be defined by a group of sociopsychological determinants (such as awareness, perception, attitude and behavior) which shapes the relationship between human beings and the environment in which they live. A variety of influencing factors must exist in relation to USSU, however, a comprehensive examination of these, looking at personal, social, environmental, economic, technical, and governance perspectives in an urban context, appear to be less well researched. As such this paper provides an exploratory and critical evaluation of the literature by focusing on the USSU determinants; with an aim toward identifying the key factors (and sub-factors) that are in relation with these determinants. Two big databases of Scopus and Web of Science-have been searched systematically for the relevant studies. Therein it is observed how these factors affect USSU according to the characteristics of the study. Sustainability focused studies were found to be more commonplace than smartness studies. Moreover, there is currently ambiguity in evaluating the impacts of the identified factors. This paper concludes that a holistic approach is needed for clarifying the relationship and causality between sociopsychological determinants on Urban Sustainability and Smartness context. A framework with six dimensions is presented to initiate future studies to develop a consistent; coherent and comprehensive methodology to assess an individuals' USSU.