The Transition toward Smart and Sustainable Cities

Increasing population followed by uncontrolled city expansion neglected many essential criteria, resulting in management challenges, social service inequities, and worsened environmental conditions. However, this development is always ongoing and overshadows daily life. City administrators desire to implement smart cities to address a wide variety of prevalent issues in metropolitan areas. This study aims to take steps toward creating a smart city. Citizens' understanding and support for a project in a city are crucial to its success. The focus of this research is to examine citizens' awareness of smart cities and their importance in helping city managers, urban planners, and architects in improved planning to realize the vision of a smart city. This article comprehensively explains the smart city by compiling and evaluating relevant facts. Also, numerous smart cities throughout the world have been researched and compared to gain insight. Furthermore, being the most important part of a smart city, the level of public knowledge about "smart cities" in Iran through a survey distribution has been analyzed. This study has the potential to create new insight into city development. The findings offer novel perspectives that can be applied to the design and planning of intelligent cities.