Routledge Advances in Regional Economics Evolving Intelligent Environments: Smart Ecosystems and Transformative Innovations in the 21st Century (Hardcover)

There is growing global interest in understanding how digital technologies 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 sustainability 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 how smart cities are evolving into intelligent environments and will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students of innovation systems smart city planning urban transportation and environmental planning governance computer science and engineering.