Towards Sustainable and Smart Cities: Replicable and KPI-Driven Evaluation Framework

Sustainability is pivotal in the urban transformation strategy in order to reach more resource-efficient, resilient and smarter cities. The goal of being a sustainable city should drive the decisions for city interventions. Nonetheless, impacts need to be quantified, lacking of standard and/or common methodologies that could be replicable across multiple cities. There exist many initiatives aiming at defining indicators and assessment procedures, but without convergence in the definition of terms and application methodologies, making complex its real implementation. Within mySMARTLife project (GA#731297), a KPI-driven evaluation framework is defined with the aim of covering the multiple pillars of a city (i.e. energy, mobility, citizens, economy) in a holistic way. This methodology also defines the concepts and terms to guide urban planners and/or experts at time of implementing the framework in a specific city. The evaluation framework has been deployed in the three cities of Nantes, Hamburg and Helsinki and some lessons learnt have been extracted, such as the necessity of providing a definition of measurement boundary to avoid interpretations. Thanks to a co-creation strategy, the main difficulties and issues from the cities have been taken into consideration for increasing the replicability.

Citizen Participation in Smart Sustainable Cities

Citizen participation and sustainability are two main concepts used in the definitions in the smart city literature. Citizen participation is often used within the context of improving good governance in smart cities. Its relationship with sustainability is seldomly discussed. This study analyses the relationship between the concepts of smart city, smart sustainable city, and citizen participation, and discusses how citizen participation is shaped in smart sustainable cities. In light of this analysis, seven types of citizen participation mechanisms are studied. The findings of the study reveal that sustainability in smart cities is only considered within the framework of environmental matters, while citizen participation is only considered as a mechanism aimed at supporting good governance. The study recommends using these participation mechanisms to highlight other aspects of sustainability such as securing comprehensiveness, alleviating poverty, promoting gender equality and to focus on other aspects of citizen participation such as real participation and democratic effectiveness.

Cyber-Gardening and Biophilic Design in Future Cities

Today, in line with nature's integrated habitats and environments, the scope of biophilic architecture emerges as an essential issue for society wellbeing. When evaluating the possibilities of enhancing access to healthy food, the necessity of including every scale of living—from the smallest individual living space to collective living areas—should be discussed. In this study, cyber-gardening practices are evaluated from critical perspectives in terms of dystopia. Cyber-gardening, systems of self-organization, and self-sufficiency concepts are crucial to envisaging a sustainable city, food, and agriculture ecosystem. Biology, architecture, and urban design-oriented approaches have emerged in the works of design groups such as EcoLogic Studio. Emerging as a kind of bio-architectural hybrid, these new physical and digital interactive garden prototypes create augmented biospheres. In these new urban-food-agriculture scenarios composed of designed virtual interfaces, visitors are transformed into urban cyber-gardeners.

Smart Cities and Sustainability

The term smart city is often synonymous with a sustainable city. The word smart implies the use of digital technology that serves to make processes and services more efficient and to connect the different actors on the urban scene. However, this is no guarantee of sustainability. A city can become sustainable if it changes its metabolism and from linear to circular as in nature's ecosystems. For this to happen, it is necessary to overcome the paradigm of quantitative economic growth based on the infinite substitutability between natural and economic capital. If smart city governance stakeholders primarily pursue profit according to the logic of the free market, the city may be smarter and efficient in the use of energy and resources, but it is not sustainable, often not even inclusive. The challenge of sustainability implies a paradigm shift and the use of digital technologies at the service of the collective good. In this context, after a general analysis of the characteristics of smart cities, the chapter focuses on an Italian case study, Turin Smart City.

Administration of Post-Reformation Decentralization Government

Decentralization is a policy for regions to maximize the functions of a regional government authority. Proportional and optimal power in mobilizing every resource in the area will make the region have independence in developing the part. The method used is a literature study; besides, the authors also use media such as newspapers, magazines, bulletins, and other sources relating to the discussion as reference material in reviewing the debate, analysis using descriptive-analytic methods. Decentralization implemented in the city of Makassar has made a very positive contribution to the people of Makassar, because, with devolution, the Makassar city government can plan its development independently for the sake of a sustainable city. The implementation of decentralization in the town of Makassar has implications for the progress of regional development; this can see in the physical event in the city and the level of economic growth.

Sustainability service learning in economics

Purpose Service learning is not comprehensively developed in economics such as the implementation of the 17 sustainability goals of the Agenda 2030 – although this would be beneficial as experiential learning is linked to democratic education goals. Service Learning offers itself as a didactic design for this purpose. The paper aims to discuss how service learning can be used to work critically and reflexively on sustainability issues in a cross-university context. Design/methodology/approach The cross-university teaching-learning project brought together students of industrial engineering and economics. The idea space “sustainable city” was to be developed together with practice partners with the help of the practice-relevant project management method scrum and methods of sustainability assessment in the sense of service learning. Evaluating the project, a written and a qualitative survey were conducted and analysed by means of descriptive statistics as well as content analysis. Findings Success factors include the regular feedback by practice partners and lecturers including reflection questions. Student heterogeneity can hinder effective project work. Complexity can deter effective and successful service learning. The use of scrum in service learning contexts cannot be fully recommended. Although scrum contributes to service learning concepts in economics, in complex sustainability projects either the method should be in focus or prior knowledge of scrum should be mandatory. Originality/value The paper discusses how service learning can be used to critically and reflexively address social and practical challenges in a cross-university context. The study contributes to the fact that the complexity of education for sustainable development competencies requires the teaching of knowledge- and fact-based fundamentals as well as methodological-research procedures for research-based and at the same time practice-oriented learning.