We are happy to announce that the special issue on “Geospatial Big Data Analytics for Smart Cities” in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems has been published online on November 2021.

This special issue is an outcome of the International Symposium on Location-Based Big Data 2019 (LocBigData 2019, held in Tokyo, Japan), which offered a platform for researchers from various disciplines and perspectives to share ideas and research findings and to discuss the open challenges and future research challenges in this emerging field.

The special issue consists of 9 papers, which reflect the front-end snapshots of current research activities in this field, and illustrate how LocBigData analytics can help to achieve smart cities.

The paper on “Analytics of location-based big data for smart cities: Opportunities, challenges, and future directions” provides a state-of-the-art review on LocaBigData analytics and identifies a series of open and key research challenges that should be addressed to advance the emerging field of LocBigData analytics or urban analytics to enable smart and sustainable cities (see the following figure for a visual summary).