Abstract
Over the past decade, the status of smart cities changed from a fancy area of research into a key policy-making consideration. The increased attention paid to smart cities by decision-makers and politicians prompted in turn a new wave of research in the domain. Urban computing is but one of the developments thus prompted. As this Special Section depicts, it is also one of the most promising domains of research likely to transform the debate on smart cities in the years to come. Urban computing offers a conceptual and methodological framework that integrates the plethora of increasingly sophisticated technologies and their applications in city/urban space. It offers a framework suitable to conceive of andbuild synergies, and to apply in the city/urban space context a variety of approaches and techniques. These include pervasive computing, big data analytics, crowdsourcing, and volunteered geographic information such as user behavior, brand popularity, recommender systems, and social media analytics. In this way, urban computing bears the promise that targeted solutions will be found for the challenges cities/urban spaces face. The objective of this Special Section in IEEE A CCESS was to explore that promise from a variety of complementary interdisciplinary perspectives, including computing/ICT, political economy, public policy, innovation, and entrepreneurship.