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Digital technologies are used in various local government activities. Adopting suitable digital technology strategies could enhance service efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. The challenges of technology adoption among local governments, however, are also evident. One of the major challenges is capacity, including the lack of knowledge or awareness of how to balance the local government’s resources and the strategies that need to be implemented. This challenge also forms a research gap. The study aims to consolidate the understanding of local government digital technology adoption strategies via the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). It analyses the adoption opportunities, challenges, and strategies through the lens of people, processes, and technology frameworks. The results show that: (a) Strategies concerning the people aspects include building a platform for public participation, employees’ skills, and decision-makers' positive mindset development. (b) Strategies concerning the process aspects include recognizing the players’ roles, having a clear aim and procedure, proper regulation, and receiving user input. (c) Strategies considering the technology aspects include understanding the effect of the technology, technological preparedness, and convenience adoption. The findings inform local government policymakers in digital technology adoption and transformation endeavors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners, and scholars, all around the globe, rethink conventional, neoliberal growth strategies of cities. The trend of rapid urbanization, particularly around capital cities, has been questioned, and alternative growth models and locations have been the subjects of countless discussions. This is particularly the case for the Australian context: The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the debates in urban circles on post-pandemic urban growth strategies and boosting the growth of towns and cities across regional Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking off the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional, and local planning, design, and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.

Quantitative measures of transport disadvantage are reviewed in this paper from the perspective of their effectiveness to investigate social exclusion. The effectiveness is assessed using criteria derived through a review of the concepts of transport disadvantage and social exclusion and their operationalisation. The specified criteria are related to issues of spatial (e.g., urban accessibility, and public transport accessibility), temporal (e.g., public transport availability, and facility opening hours), and social attributes of travel and activity participation (e.g., personal mobility, and disability). Four groups of transport disadvantage measures are identified and evaluated. These include deprivation-based measures, mobility-based measures, accessibility-based measures, and activity-based measures. The review suggests that although the first three categories of measures have traditionally been used to identify transport disadvantage, they do not satisfy issues surrounding activity participation—the key outcome of social exclusion. The activity space concept is a way in which these issues can be incorporated, as it is a measure of the outcomes of activity participation and their associated travel to that activity. Participation in an activity means that an individual has overcome the spatial, temporal and social barriers of travel for that activity. The research using the activity space concept has, however, inadequately identified individual travel and activity participation. This has been due to a separate application of a range of different indicators to assess activity space size. These indicators are by their nature multidimensional—e.g., area visited, distance travelled, and number of activity sites visited. Although each indicator represents a specific qualitative/quantitative aspect of travel and activity participation, researchers have treated these indicators in an isolated manner to identify transport disadvantage and consequently transport-related social exclusion. This paper identifies the weaknesses and strengths associated with these measures; and methods are directed to overcome the limitations.

Despite the rhetoric of “citizen-first,” which has been tokenized in recent years by the smart city administrations, what it means has long been unclear to many, including the public at large. Put simply, this rhetoric concerns the mindset of the members of a local community and places them at the heart of the smart city initiatives. In order to bring further clarity to this issue under the current neoliberal urbanism, this study aimed to identify the key indicators of citizen-centric smart cities from the perspective of participative governance practices and citizens’ responsibilities. To achieve this aim, this study involved a systematic literature review of the social inclusion indicators for building citizen-centric smart cities. The social inclusion indicators that were formed were verified by practitioners to suit the local contexts of an emerging and developing country, in this case, Malaysia. The findings of the review revealed that: (a) the acceptance of social inclusion indicators was mainly limited to the realm of democratic developed countries, leaders’ understanding of citizenship, the delegation of decision-making power in governance practices, the participative culture of societies, and individual citizens’ self-discipline; (b) the social inclusion indicators may not be welcomed in emerging and developing countries; (c) in the long term, these indicators would shed light on the rise of self-organizing cities that will gain popularity in potential city developments, be it in developed or developing countries.

During the last couple of decades, making cities smarter and more sustainable has become an important urban agenda. In this perspective, knowledge-based development is seen as a strategic approach for cities seeking to thrive through innovation and resilience. Accomplishing a knowledge-based development agenda is, however, challenging, and cities need support mechanisms to effectively develop and then incorporate such agendas into their decision-making processes. This study investigates the role of international events as one of these support mechanisms for the development and implementation of local knowledge-based development agendas. The study aims to address how international events contribute to the local knowledge-based development efforts. This study takes the Knowledge Cities World Summit (KCWS) series as the exemplar international event, and the Brazilian city of Bento Gonçalves as the case study city. The methodological approach of the study consists of semi-structured interview-based qualitative analysis and case study investigations. The findings of the study revealed the following: (a) international events can be fundamental drivers of local knowledge-based agendas; (b) these events contribute to host cities’ development, especially at an institutional level, by generating outcomes such as engagement in cooperation networks and leveraging local actors’ influence on the development process; and (c) KCWS was instrumental in placing the local university as a protagonist of the knowledge-based development movement of Bento Gonçalves. The study reported in this paper provides invaluable insights for cities seeking to use international knowledge-based development events for smart and sustainable city formation.

The purpose of this study is to address the following research question: What is the relationship between open innovation and firm performance? The study built up a research framework with three factors—i.e., open innovation strategy, time scope, and industry condition—to find out the concrete open innovation effects on firm performance. This study adopted four different research methods. Firstly, we applied the aforementioned factors to a game of life simulation in order to identify the concrete differences of open innovation effects on firm performance. Secondly, the study examined the real dynamics of open innovation effects on firm performance in the aircraft industry—one of the oldest modern industries—through a quantitative patent analysis. It then looked into the effects of major factors that impact open innovation effects. Thirdly, this study developed a mathematical model and tried to open the black box of open innovation effects on firm performance. Lastly, the study logically compiled research on open innovation effects on firm performance through the presentation of a causal loop model and derived the possible implications.

In many parts of the world, a rapid urbanization process is taking place at an unprecedented scale, and its drastic impacts on societies and the environment are evident. To combat the externalities of such rapid, and to a degree uncontrolled, development, many cities around the globe introduced various urban growth management policies. However, policy making—to provide sustainable outcomes, while generating growth opportunities—has been a daunting task for urban administrators. To ease the task, scenario-based planning methods are introduced to produce alternative visions for managing urban growth in sustainable ways by incorporating various socio-environmental issues. However, even though modelling urban growth and associated impacts based on these scenarios have emerged to strengthen and quantify the future of urban policies and related planning actions, this process has a number of glitches. Major issues include the uncertainties associated with the selection of suitable methods to generate scenarios, identify indicators to be used to assess scenarios, evaluate scenarios to prioritize for policy formulation, and assess the impacts of policy scenarios. This paper aims to address the challenge of developing suitable policy scenarios for sustainable urban growth. As for the methodological approach, the study undertakes a thorough review of the literature and current practices, and conducts a two-round Delphi survey—involving experts from public, private and academic sectors specialized in the fields of urban planning, environmental planning, social planning, transportation modelling, and economic development. The expert driven policy scenarios are validated in a local context by comparing findings against the policy options as proposed in the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2017 (Australia). The findings offer valuable guidelines for planners, modellers, and policy makers in adopting suitable methods, indicators, and policy priorities, and thus, easing the daunting task of generating sustainable policy solutions.