The city digital twin is anticipated to accurately reflect and affect the city’s functions and processes to enhance its realization, operability, and management. Although research on the city digital twin is still in its infancy, the advancement of the digital twin technology is growing fast and providing viable contributions to augmenting smart city developments. This study reviews the literature to identify the current and prospective potentials and challenges of digital twin cities. A research agenda is also proposed to guide future research on the city digital twincity digital twin to reach the utmost level of a comprehensive and complete city digital twin. Enhancing the efficiency of data processing, promoting the inclusion of socio-economic components of the city, and developing mutual integration between the two counterparts of the digital twin are proposed to be the future research directions to achieve and utilize a completely mirrored city digital twin.

Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) affects several spheres, including environmental, social, and economic activities. In Ethiopia, massive waste generation and unbalanced management have worsened the issue. Hence, this systematic review investigates the Ethiopian MSWM policy and legal frameworks, practices, and challenges. The Scopus and Web of Science databases and Google Scholar were used to search published and unpublished studies from 2005 to 2021, and a website search was used to find studies from 1995 to 2021. The search was restricted to the English language, and the last search was conducted on 25 June 2021. The study was extracted from the characteristics of the developed study. A risk of bias assessment was conducted for the included studies using the AMSTAR 2. Among the 1135 identified records, 72 studies were found to be eligible. This systematic review identified numerous legal frameworks that enhance the implementation of MSWM in Ethiopia, which is mainly focused on waste collection, transportation, and disposal. Lack of policy enforcement, weak capacity, public awareness, and minimal cooperation among stakeholders were the main challenges. MSWM problems in Ethiopia have seen an increase in recent decades and are affecting daily life. Therefore, these findings may help to improve MSWM in Ethiopia.

Delays in road construction projects due to various reasons are a major problem facing construction professionals. The incapability of finishing projects punctually and within a given budget is a persistent issue worldwide. This study aims to determine the ten principal causes of delay in road construction projects in 25 developing countries across the globe. The study involves two steps. First, the authors compiled information regarding the most frequent delays in a road construction project. Second, they analyzed the intensity of each cause of delay in these projects. Being more accurate in the methodology, given the nature of the information, the researchers used a quasi-meta-analysis for processing the data. Half (50%) of the countries have similar causes of delay, and likewise, 50% of the countries identified the top ten primary causes of delay in road construction projects based on the intensity results. This study uses the results of the intensity. According to the results of the homologation, the lack of experience of the construction manager, inadequate planning/scheduling, and influence on people’s land alongside the road construction project (expropriation for the construction of the project) have more significant impacts than frequent changes in the design (which was listed as the most frequent cause of delay).

Due to rapid urbanization and the recent growing influx of migrants from politically fragile states, cities are now faced with an impending housing problem. In developing countries like Nigeria, the impacts of the housing problem, which include economic, social (humanitarian), and environmental crises, are evident. Recently, sustainability has become a central theme for public discussion, not only in expanding housing for the growing population but also in improving the quality of residential livelihoods of low-income households without compromising the housing needs of future generations. So far, there have been numerous studies conducted on sustainable housing in Nigeria, touching on sustainability in housing but mostly from the professionals’ point of view. Therefore, a document content analysis to generate success criteria and a survey for household validation were conducted. Results show that security ranks the highest, and other criteria of importance include accessibility, adaptability, utility, technology, community, affordability, and acceptability. Hence, the study concludes that social and environmental sustainability in housing should enhance household satisfaction by ensuring the security and welfare of its residents, adapt to its immediate environment, be acceptable, be supported with social amenity to integrate the community through participation, and, finally, manage household utility efficiently.

The discourse of disaster governance is focused on the arrangements, relationships, and roles of the various actors involved in disaster governance. However, due to the lack of research on utilizing emerging technologies in disaster governance systems, this paper addresses the prospective benefits of utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in smart disaster governance systems. The authors employed a conceptual analysis of the previous research on disaster governance and utilizing IoT in disaster management. The basic concepts and constructs were abstracted from the literature to conceptualize a smart disaster governance system and its processes. As a result, six spheres were portrayed to form the characteristics of the smart disaster governance system, and an integrative conceptual framework for smart disaster governance was developed. The conceptual framework encompasses IoT technologies’ capabilities and disaster governance functions, in addition to the foreseen enhancements in disaster coping capacities and an overall rise in disaster resilience. A hypothetical case study was conducted to investigate the conceptual framework’s plausibility, and it showed a probable enhancement of the disaster governance of the 2018 Kerala floods if the smart disaster governance framework was utilized. This research provides a novel conceptualization of smart disaster governance. It can deepen the understanding of prospective benefits of integrating IoT technologies with disaster governance functions, contribute to disaster governance policy formulations, and construct a basis for future research on smart disaster governance for a sustainable society.

Smart mobility is becoming an alternative technology of transportation development for today and the future. Thailand has applied the intelligent transport system (ITS) to improve traffic and transport services. The success of the project is generally dependent on collaboration between private, public, and governmental agencies in policymaking and planning, coupled with an inclusive agreement and technological knowledge in the field. This study argues that Thailand’s automatic transportation has been successful because of cooperative-ITS (C-ITS). This study explores the evidence-based cases of ITS development from six areas, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, China, the European Union, and the United States of America, to explain how the C-ITS conditions support the success of ITS. The study uses the SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) and TOWS (Threat, Opportunity, Weakness, Strength) analysis matrix to identify influential factors from the six-area cases and compare them to Thailand. The authors identified seven components that relate to the success of Thailand’s C-ITS. These include: (1) Pragmatic policy for pilot project implementation; (2) close cooperation among stakeholders; (3) working criteria for C-ITS development; (4) architecture of standard and framework; (5) share of lessons learned about current technology; (6) capability of C-ITS deployment; and (7) a clear statement of data exchange and sharing. These findings represent both the threat and opportunity for traffic and transport improvement in Thailand through the C-ITS approach.