review · Urban Governance
Rapid urbanisation creates critical challenges for resource efficiency and sustainability across modern cities. Integrating big data into municipal systems offers a practical solution, particularly across five core infrastructure sectors: energy management, transportation, water resources, waste management, and green spaces. Real-world deployments in cities such as Barcelona, Singapore, Amsterdam, and New York show that data-driven approaches can successfully optimise infrastructure networks while securing better environmental and social outcomes. Nevertheless, widespread adoption encounters substantial barriers. Municipalities routinely face concerns over data privacy, gaps in technical workforce expertise, and the significant financial expenditure needed for physical and digital infrastructure upgrades. When these challenges are managed, data technologies play a transformative role in reinforcing urban resilience, cutting environmental footprints, and enabling long-term urban sustainability.
Rapid urban growth strains municipal resources and environments worldwide. Understanding how leading cities deploy big data across essential services provides a practical perspective on how to improve daily public utilities, cut emissions, and build resilient communities. It also highlights the technical, financial, and privacy hurdles that municipal leaders must navigate when modernising public infrastructure.
The findings outline applied, operational technologies suitable for municipal authorities, urban planners, and utility operators. Potential commercial applications include analytics platforms for traffic flow, energy efficiency, water monitoring, and automated waste handling. While relevant tools are already active in select major cities, broad commercial roll-out remains constrained by high infrastructure upgrade costs, local technical capacity deficits, and strict data privacy demands.
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As urbanization accelerates globally, cities face unprecedented challenges related to infrastructure management, resource efficiency, and sustainability. To address these issues, many cities are increasingly integrating big data into their infrastructure systems, particularly within the context of smart cities. This study provides a comprehensive review of how big data is utilized to promote sustainable urban infrastructure, focusing on five key areas: energy management, transportation systems, water resources, waste management, and green infrastructure. The analysis draws on successful case studies from cities such as Barcelona, Singapore, Amsterdam, and New York, exploring how these urban centers leverage big data to optimize infrastructure systems and improve environmental and social outcomes. Additionally, this review identifies the challenges cities face when integrating big data into their planning processes, including data privacy concerns, technical expertise gaps, and the high costs of infrastructure upgrades. The findings suggest that big data plays a transformative role in enhancing urban resilience, reducing environmental impact, and fostering long-term sustainability. The study concludes by highlighting future research opportunities, particularly the potential of AI and advanced analytics in further optimizing smart city infrastructure.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.ugj.2025.02.003
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