At present, sustainable urban development constitutes a major planning goal for many urban environments coping with contemporary challenges and problems confronted by world cities. Towards this end, the concept of smart cities emerges as a promising policy option for effectively dealing with sustainability objectives. In this respect, the focus of the present paper is on the development of an ICT-enabled participatory planning framework for guiding policy-making towards the planning of smart cities. This framework is in alignment with the argument that smart-city solutions must start with the “city” not with the “smart,” shifting from a technology-pushed to an application-pulled smart-city planning approach, matching different types of “smartness” (technologies, tools, and applications) with different types of urban functions and contexts. It is also built upon a digital platform, integrating tools and technologies for data management and e-participatory planning that can support city- and citizen-specific decision making, capable of dealing with objectives for urban sustainability.

Radical developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) have widely affected urban sectors including cultural tourism. Furthermore, ICT have influenced modern spatial planning practices and have contributed to the advancement of interactive Web-GIS technologies that create new challenges and opportunities for spatial data management and potential for stakeholders’ engagement in planning. The convergence of culture, tourism, and ICT; developments in ICT-enabled planning; and interactive Web-GIS technologies have offered new opportunities for collaborative cultural planning. In such a context, the scope of this paper is to combine ICT-enabled, planning-related principles, cultural mapping, crowdsourcing, data management tools, and spatial models in an integrated framework, serving heritage-led development objectives. Focus is placed on broadening cultural planning perspectives through strengthening stakeholders’ engagement in the process of sustainably managing local assets and designing cultural tourism products that spread benefits to the local economy and reboot development processes. The study attempts to illustrate the added value of mature ICT-enabled approaches, tools, and technologies in the cultural tourism sector, reflecting the increasing smart tourism interest and applications that flourish in a smart city context.

The goal of the paper is to elaborate on sustainability aspects of smart sustainable urban environments. More specifically, at a first step the paper aims at critically reviewing globally initiated state-of-the-art approaches for assessing smart cities' performance as to sustainability objectives. The scope of this effort is to identify sets of indicators used in different approaches as well as convergence/divergence among them. Secondly, an attempt to integrate different indicator sets into a more enriched and coherent indicator system is carried out which, by effectively embedding smart and sustainable city development into sustainability indicators' sets, can be used by various types of cities' examples. Finally, the rationale of the indicators' selection process is depicted, in order to support policy makers and planners' guidance towards choosing an appropriate, city-specific set of sustainability indicators for carrying out relevant assessments.

In the UN Agenda 2030, tourism acquires a salient position as a critical sector, directly or indirectly influencing a number of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The pursuit of Sustainable Tourism (ST) is founded on the respectful exploitation of the sector’s core ‘raw material’, i.e., the precious and vulnerable nexus of natural and cultural heritage, and a cooperative multi-actor endeavor of all those having a stake in this shared good. Strategic tourism policy decisions, formulated at the state level, frame actors’ actions, favoring a balance among economic, societal and environmental goals; and a transparent, concrete and supportive investment landscape, allowing the tourism sector to blossom. But how successful are these policy decisions in promoting a sustainable, resilient and durable tourism model by instigating the entrepreneurial community to invest in the vibrant culture–tourism complex? An effort to respond to this concern is made in this work, grounded in the ‘Culture–Tourism–Policy’ triptych and their interaction, the ‘policy cycle’ as a means of assessing policy performance towards establishing a sustainable/resilient ‘marriage’ of ‘Culture–Tourism’, and GIS-enabled spatial data management for an evidence-based assessment of policy outcomes. These three factors are closely intertwined in the assessment of strategic tourism policy decisions’ performance in a culturally vibrant and highly reputed destination, Greece.