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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 paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Enhancing sustainable urban development through smart city applications from 2017 by Margarita Angelidiou, Artemis Psaltoglou, Nicos Komninos, Christina Kakderi, Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos and Anastasia Panori, published in the Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what smart city approaches and tools can contribute to the environmental sustainability domain. This article connects the smart and sustainable cities debate and identifies areas where the smart city applications could and should be enhanced for better sustainability.

Sustainable urban development and smart cities represent two different approaches resulting from cities becoming more responsive to citizen needs, promoting better quality of life, and enhancing competitiveness in the increasingly globalised environment. Sustainability and smart city solutions are brought together due to the urban challenges we face: reducing resource consumption, monitoring urban environments, and making informed technical and policy decisions. The synergies and benefits of their intersections were recognised by many international agencies, the United Nations and the European Union, among others.

Despite the recognised synergy, there is still a misalignment between the targets of smart and sustainable urban development assessment frameworks. Smart city frameworks usually downplay the importance of environmental sustainability. Other recent works highlight the importance of researching the intersection of smart and sustainable cities to enable a deeper understanding of both domains. Therefore, this article investigates the potential contribution of smart city approaches and tools to sustainable urban development.

The authors continued with describing sustainable urban development, smart cities and sustainable smart cities. Sustainability emerged from the combined environmental, social and economic concerns of the last decades, but sustainability is still without a widely accepted definition. The role of cities in sustainable development is clearly reflected in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Goal Number 11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Due to their accumulated people and activities, contemporary cities are the world’s major environmental polluters and energy consumers.

Thus, cities need to become more sustainable, liveable, wealthier, consume fewer resources and minimise the environmental impact of human activity. In recent years, we have seen increasing technical and environmental performance requirements and assessment frameworks, such as LEED or BREEAM. The most significant aspect in these seems to be infrastructure, followed by ecology, resources and energy, and transportation. Additionally, cities offer ideal testing grounds for new solutions. They are the places where new ideas are created, tested and advanced; therefore, many approaches and sustainable urban development frameworks reference the role of ICTs and citizen participation in advancing sustainability goals in cities.

Smart cities are driven by the conceptual and process innovations of the twentieth century and enabled by the tremendous technological advancements of the past decades. Technology is regarded as an enabling force for the emergence of new forms of intelligence and collaboration that enhance the city’s problem-solving capacity. In reports, there are many smart city projects and policies around the globe; however, their self-congratulatory and label nature makes it hard to see the real enhancements. Smart cities remain highly contested and ambiguous, raising practical questions about the concept.

Smart cities stand for an idea of where a city wants to be in the future and how it imagines itself transformed by taking advantage of the capabilities of digital technology, human capital and innovation networks. It is not achievable in the here and now, but a strategic approach to fulfilling a long-term aspiration. To become a smart city, a set of requirements apply: a comprehensive sequence of strategic choices, a great deal of commitment in resources, monetary investment, and stakeholders’ involvement with sometimes overlapping or conflicting roles. These need to be coordinated and handled with a clearly defined policy framework.

Smart sustainable city has been proposed as an alternative to the two standalone concepts to secure the existence of a sustainability dimension within smart city initiatives, tools, and applications. The smart sustainable city has been defined as an innovative city that uses ICTs and other means to improve quality of life, the efficiency of urban operation and services and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations concerning economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects. However, smart sustainable cities also have many different causes of existence and pillars, so they are also ambiguous to a certain point.

Finally, one extremely ambitious challenge emerged within smart cities: zero vision refers to the use of smart city technologies to achieve highly ambitious targets of zero negative impacts in cities and become fully sustainable, offering their citizens a high quality of life. Zero vision seems to be important, though the research in this area is still limited. Zero vision can be applied to various domains of the city, such as zero traffic accidents, zero CO2 emissions, zero crime, zero waste. Recently, zero vision also achieved international fame, and there are strategies and action plans for zero emissions, zero traffic accidents and zero waste, among others. These are long-term strategies requiring changes not only in infrastructure and legislation but also in the culture and way of urban life. Therefore, urban planning, education, public services, digital technologies are all part of the solution for zero vision.

This article aimed to answer the questions: what kind of digital application cities can currently use to tackle environmental issues, identify the main trends, detect gaps in technical and policy levels, and see whether these applications could attain the zero vision objective. For this, the authors analysed 32 applications addressing environmental sustainability issues found in the Intelligent/Smart cities Open Source – abbreviated to ICOS – community repository. Their domains categorised each application: innovation economy, living in the city with quality of life, city infrastructure and utilities, city governance, and generic.

The researchers examined the availability and characteristics of smart city applications in sustainable urban development, addressing the specific sustainability challenges of green motorised mobility, waste, air pollution, energy consumption, urban biodiversity and water management. Additionally, the applications were classified according to their mitigation strategies, ICT functions, innovation mechanisms and outcomes.

First and foremost, they found that the smart and sustainable city landscape is highly fragmented on policy and technical levels. There are many unexplored opportunities toward smart sustainable development and even toward the zero vision. However, achieving these would require different and innovative ways of thinking and acting.

In the green mobility domain, there is a need for integrated, crowd-sourced digital applications that allow information sharing on traffic congestion and events affecting urban mobility. Integrated applications for waste management are required for process innovations in information sharing and identifying problems. Integrated technology-driven applications are needed in the air pollution domain for urban stakeholders to make decisions and solve problems. More crowd-sourced applications in the energy consumption domain could allow consumers to share information and resources. Technology-driven and crowd-sourced applications for urban biodiversity could allow better problem solving and decision-making for stakeholders. Finally, in the water management domain, crowd-sourced applications and process innovations could enable stakeholders to collectively make decisions and solve problems.

For these solutions to occur, specific actions are needed on the policy level. Policy-makers need to make a harmonised, long-term effort to become proactive, knowledge-driven and more responsive to their constituents’ needs. Open government could encourage and involve stakeholders in policy- and decision making. Data management and analysis are also needed, acknowledging that the data needs to be accurate, meaningful, and in actionable formats. And policy-making and urban government need to be information and evidence-based using the available data.

Furthermore, specific policies are required to support and encourage entrepreneurship and startup creation, especially in the areas where technical gaps exist. The sustainability landscape is so vast that no local government can address smart city service gaps alone, as governments are typically constrained by bureaucracy and limited human and financial resources. Solutions are very location-based, and the local entrepreneurs, their ecosystems and the local community are in the best position to tackle many localised challenges.

Moreover, the gap between policy for sustainability and smart city technologies should also be bridged to address specific needs and market niches in the urban sustainability domain. Governments could encourage the advancement of research in academia and industry. Research could find solutions in the smart city area for sustainability problems and vice versa and their synergies. These could open the way for new, improved lines of thinking and act toward urban sustainability.

Finally, policy measures need to be taken on a vertical level. By looking at the specific challenges of urban environmental sustainability – mobility, waste, air pollution, energy consumption, urban biodiversity, water management – policy-makers can develop highly accurate, targeted and ultimately more effective thematic policies and strategies as in the case of the zero vision strategy.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Sustainable urban development, smart city and smart sustainable city concepts are emerging and being highly important, though without widely accepted definitions.
2. Smart city applications for environmental sustainability do exist though their shortcomings are good to keep in mind, especially regarding helping decision-making.
3. The change also needs to involve policy change encouraging innovation, as governmental levels cannot address all problems, and local communities and entrepreneurs are best suited to solve their specific problems.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How can the not direct effects of such applications be measured and prepared for? Yes, they have a specific aim, but do they have greater effects than their immediate goal?
2. How would you resolve the NIMBY, not in my backyard problem?
3. What problem do you see in your neighbourhood for which you could create a solution?

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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