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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research article by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original article, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole article.

So, this research episode is working with a 2017 article about the differences between sustainable and smart cities. Since this podcast investigates different futures for the cities, I thought it would be beneficial to look at the potential differences between two popular urban futures. This article gives an insight into city assessment tools regarding smartness and sustainability in urban areas and a recommendation to use smart sustainable cities as a more appropriate term for the future of cities.

Our summary today works with the article titled What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities? from 2017 by Hannele Ahvenniemi, Aapo Huovila, Isabel Pinto-Seppä and Miimu Airaksinen. The article was published in the Cities journal to discuss differences and similarities between the smart and sustainable city concepts and their compatibility.

According to the article, there is an urgent need to develop smart solutions to overcome the challenges of urbanisation, such as pollution, congestion, waste management and human health. The new technologies in cities can have a key role in fighting against those challenges and also impacting environmental sustainability, citizens’ well-being and financial sustainability. The authors found that the smart city and the sustainable city concepts have similar goals in their research. They also highlighted the variety of smart city definitions, initiatives and directions within the smart city area. Their study aimed to understand the similarities and differences between the sustainable and smart city concepts and their assessment frameworks and indices by comparing eight such systems.

For clearing out any misunderstandings, they started with the meaning of urban sustainability. Based on the original sustainable development definition, a city can be defined as sustainable if its production conditions do not destroy the requirements of its reproduction over time. A more recent explanation defines sustainable urban development as achieving a balance between the development of the urban areas and protecting the environment with an eye to equity in income, employment, shelter, basic services, social infrastructure and transportation in the urban areas. The updated versions also include not just buildings but whole neighbourhoods and districts into the meaning.

Afterwards, they examined the state of the assessment tools and their understandings of urban sustainability. They found fragmentation in meaning and suggested that the abence of a less general and more universal definition of sustainable development has given rise to multiple interpretations and has triggered an explosion of indicators. Acknowledging this mixture, they applied a systemic approach. Cities are understood as urban ecosystems composed of interactions between the social, biological and physical components, and understanding the relationships among those is crucial for sustainability.

Additionally, the authors wanted to establish the meaning of smart cities as well. They summarised smart city with two streams: 1. The ICT and technology-oriented approach, and 2. The people-oriented approach. And of course, there were many different definitions from the literature and frameworks for smart cities.

The study selected a set of smart city assessment frameworks and the same amount of urban sustainability frameworks. Assessment frameworks meant rankings, indices, and they were selected by using three criteria: 1. A clear statement of measuring smartness or urban sustainability respectively, 2. Detailed level of information about indicators and methods, 3. Must include several urban function areas, for example, transport AND energy. Thus, they had eight frameworks for the smart city and the sustainable city.

To make the study even more precise, they highlighted the differences between indicator and data or variable. Indicators are figures or other measures that enable information on a complex phenomenon to be simplified into a relatively easy to use and understandable form. The three primary functions of indicators are quantification, simplification and communication. Data and variable become an indicator only when its role in evaluating the phenomenon has been established, meaning that the changes of the data and variable have been defined as negative or positive. There was no weighting considered in this study because it was not part of most analysed frameworks. Furthermore, they did not use the normalisation of indicators to equalise the importance of different frameworks because the objective was to compare the use of the smart and sustainable indicators and not the frameworks.

To study the differences of smartness and sustainability, they introduced two types of categories for indicators when analysing the different set of assessment tools: 3 impact categories with the three pillars of sustainability, economic, social and environmental sustainability; and ten sector categories with natural environment; built environment; water and waste management; transport; energy; economy; education, culture, science and innovation; well-being, health and safety; governance and citizen engagement; ICT. The collected 958 indicators were divided between the three impact and the ten sector categories creating a matrix. Finally, they used a t-test to determine whether the differences between the two types of assessment frameworks are statistically significant.

Their results suggest that the smart city targets are highly related to social aspects, whereas environmental issues are considered less important. In the sustainability assessments, economic sustainability is clearly in minority, while environmental and social sustainability are covered almost evenly. Comparing the smart city and the sustainable city concepts, both cover social sustainability; still, there are bigger differences with the sector categories, such as education, culture, science and innovation and economy being huge in the smart city assessments but not in the sustainable city assessments. The impact categories’ significance was real in environmental and economic sustainability but not in social sustainability, while for the sector categories, five were significantly different, the other five were not.

Nowadays, the interest in achieving sustainability with smartness has led to the increasing popularity of the smart city concept. Their study aimed to understand that to what extent the smart city concept addresses the same issues as the sustainable city concept. The stronger emphasis on ICT and smartness in the smart city frameworks was an expected observation. A surprising one was that sustainability assessments mainly focus on environmental sustainability. The smart city assessments lack environmental indicators but focus more on social and economic aspects.

The purpose of the smart city assessment frameworks is to give guidance for decision-making, enable target setting for cities, and assess whether the development is processing towards the wanted direction. However, the variety of definitions for smart cities and sustainable cities poses challenges to the target setting of cities. The comparison of the two concepts through their assessment frameworks highlighted that the environmental and energy-related indicators are clearly underrepresented in the analysed smart city frameworks. The authors stated that the role of technologies in smart cities should not be technology as an end in itself but the tool for sustainable development in cities, since a city that is not sustainable is not really smart. And that’s why they suggested the use of the more accurate term of smart sustainable cities.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects: 1. The authors were not able to state the definition for smart or sustainable cities but established their characteristics from the use of such concepts through the assessment frameworks. 2. The many different definitions make it hard for decision-makers to develop sound goals for the cities. 3. The smart city concept is not solely about technology, and it must incorporate sustainability as a city cannot be smart without being sustainable.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions: 1. Was it examined what type of cities (size, location, demographics) the investigated assessment frameworks are created for? How would this change the comparison, it at all? 2. How can these assessment frameworks help create better cities the best and not just from the top-down but bottom-up? 3. How can these assessment frameworks be instrumental and not just marketing tools?

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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