Networking and communications for smart cities special issue editorial

Abstract

Our society is facing an unprecedented massive urbanization. At the time of writing, 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas (with an 82% peak in North America), opposed to only 30% in 1950. Reports [1] predict that 66% of the world’s population will be urban by 2050, i.e. a sheer increase of 2.5 billion urban citizens, owing to the absolute population growth. The obvious (but not nearly trivial!) emerging challenge is how to successfully accomplish a sustainable urbanization at such level and scale.