Evolving Intelligent Environments: Smart Ecosystems and Transformative Innovations in the 21st Century

There is growing global interest in understanding how digital technologies, institutional and physical spaces, particularly within the framework of digital and green agendas, can transform cities, influence behaviour, and stimulate innovation. This book advances a novel and interdisciplinary framework for understanding intelligent environments, grounded in the concept of connected intelligence, the integration of human, collective, and machine intelligence.

It explores how this integration operates within real-world smart ecosystems to drive transformative innovations in sustainable development, carbon neutrality, urban efficiency, and liveability. Departing from approaches that treat intelligent systems as purely technological constructs, such as urban artificial intelligence (AI), cyber-physical infrastructure, digital twins, and machine learning vision, it reframes intelligent environments as socio-technical systems that remain fundamentally human-centric, even in the age of AI. It distinguishes itself from existing smart city literature, which often isolates digital technologies and IoT infrastructures for cities, by offering a comprehensive investigation of smart ecosystems as digital-institutional-physical (DIP) spaces; an analysis of real-world environments where connected intelligence is enacted, including industrial sectors evolving into smart-green ecosystems, platform services augmented by generative AI, carbon-neutral residential districts; and the development of a universal architecture of connected intelligence, applicable across diverse ecosystems.

By bridging theory and practice and integrating technological, institutional, and territorial perspectives, the book introduces a conceptual and practical lens to understand how smart ecosystems enable ongoing transformative innovations that are reshaping the near future of cities and regions. It offers insights into evolving intelligent environments and will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students of innovation systems, smart cities, urban development and planning, transportation and environmental planning, governance, digital systems, and engineering.

Nicos Komninos is a professor of Urban Development and Innovation Policy and director of URENIO Research, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.