Purpose This paper investigates the potential contribution of smart city approaches and tools to sustainable urban development in the environment domain. Recent research has highlighted the need to explore the relation of smart and sustainable cities more systematically, focusing on practical applications that could enable a deeper understanding of the included domains, typologies and design concepts, and this paper aims to address this research gap. At the same time, it tries to identify whether these applications could contribute to the “zero vision” strategy, an extremely ambitious challenge within the field of smart cities. Design/methodology/approach This objective is pursued through an in-depth investigation of available open source and proprietary smart city applications related to environmental sustainability in urban environments. A total of 32 applications were detected through the Intelligent/Smart Cities Open Source (ICOS) community, a meta-repository for smart cities solutions. The applications are analyzed comparatively regarding (i) the environmental issue addressed, (ii) the associated mitigation strategies, (iii) the included innovation mechanism, (iv) the role of information and communication technologies and (v) the overall outcome. Findings The findings suggest that the smart and sustainable city landscape is extremely fragmented both on the policy and the technical levels. There is a host of unexplored opportunities toward smart sustainable development, many of which are still unknown. Similar findings are reached for all categories of environmental challenges in cities. Research limitations pertain to the analysis of a relatively small number of applications. The results can be used to inform policy making toward becoming more proactive and impactful both locally and globally. Given that smart city application market niches are also identified, they are also of special interest to developers, user communities and digital entrepreneurs. Originality/value The value added by this paper is two-fold. At the theoretical level, it offers a neat conceptual bridge between smart and sustainable cities debate. At the practical level, it identifies under-researched and under-exploited fields of smart city applications that could be opportunities to attain the “zero vision” objective.
This paper addresses the problem of low impact of smart city applications observed in the fields of energy and transport, which constitute high-priority domains for the development of smart cities. However, these are not the only fields where the impact of smart cities has been limited. The paper provides an explanation for the low impact of various individual applications of smart cities and discusses ways of improving their effectiveness. We argue that the impact of applications depends primarily on their ontology, and secondarily on smart technology and programming features. Consequently, we start by creating an overall ontology for the smart city, defining the building blocks of this ontology with respect to the most cited definitions of smart cities, and structuring this ontology with the Protégé 5.0 editor, defining entities, class hierarchy, object properties, and data type properties. We then analyze how the ontologies of a sample of smart city applications fit into the overall Smart City Ontology, the consistency between digital spaces, knowledge processes, city domains targeted by the applications, and the types of innovation that determine their impact. In conclusion, we underline the relationships between innovation and ontology, and discuss how we can improve the effectiveness of smart city applications, combining expert and user-driven ontology design with the integration and or-chestration of applications over platforms and larger city entities such as neighborhoods, districts, clusters, and sectors of city activities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put lifestyles in question, changed daily routines, and limited citizen freedoms that seemed inalienable before. A human activity that has been greatly affected since the beginning of the health crisis is mobility. Focusing on mobility, we aim to discuss the transformational impact that the pandemic brought to this specific urban domain, especially with regards to the promotion of sustainability, the smart growth agenda, and the acceleration towards the smart city paradigm. We collect 60 initial policy responses related to urban mobility from cities around the world and analyze them based on the challenge they aim to address, the exact principles of smart growth and sustainable mobility that they encapsulate, as well as the level of ICT penetration. Our findings suggest that emerging strategies, although mainly temporary, are transformational, in line with the principles of smart growth and sustainable development. Most policy responses adopted during the first months of the pandemic, however, fail to leverage advancements made in the field of smart cities, and to adopt off-the-shelf solutions such as monitoring, alerting, and operations management.
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