Are People Responsive to a More Sustainable, Decentralized, and User-Driven Management of Urban Metabolism?

Abstract

Smart, green, and resilient city paradigms have been mainly promoted through top-down and technocratic approaches. However, based on the notion to return to "the right to the city", emerging community-driven initiatives are providing self-managed infrastructures contributing to urban sustainability transitions. This paper explores the relevance of the behavioral aspects of people-centered approaches in dealing with two different facets of urban metabolism: physical infrastructure (involvement with the management of decentralized infrastructures) and consumption patterns (involvement in proactive reduction of resources used). In the first case we assessed community perceptions about the roles, benefits, and willingness to proactively engage in the management of decentralized green infrastructures in Bogotá City, Colombia. For the second facet, we measured the effectiveness of change agents in re-shaping energy consumption decisions within urban social networks in South Africa and Saudi Arabia. This paper's results show that pre-determined and standardized strategies do not guarantee positive, nor homogeneous, results in terms of meeting sustainability targets, or promoting community involvement. Hence, a better integration of people-centered and top-down approaches is needed through context-dependent policies, for enhancing both users' appreciation of and commitment to urban metabolism participative management.

Smart Cities as Organizational Fields: A Framework for Mapping Sustainability-Enabling Configurations

“…Other authors claim that this wedding of big global vendors and local governments results in a substantially vendor-driven top-down approach that loses touch with reality and leaves little room to the concrete needs of ordinary people [60,61]. A growing line of research proposes, instead, a bottom-up, actor-oriented architecture [62] for managing smart city initiatives [63,64]. This line of research converges with the steadily growing attention to local entrepreneurship as the core engine of viable smart innovation [21,[64][65][66][67][68], because entrepreneurs can (re)build new tailored business models that fit a specific city's needs and conditions.…”

“…However, a higher-level vision of the city's sustainable future is needed to orient entrepreneurs' efforts, and the government plays an often irreplaceable role in providing this vision, bringing the necessary resources and facilitating the interactions between the relevant actors that are expected to contribute to smart city initiatives [15]. The citizens should be actively involved in these collaborative interactions, because users' appreciation of, and commitment to, urban change is almost always essential to smart initiatives' success [63]. Effective collaborative interactions between startups/entrepreneurs, scientists and citizens [69][70][71] allow for viable, distributed experimentation on concrete city-level needs [64].…”

Reconsidering the Geddesian Concepts of Community and Space through the Paradigm of Smart Cities

“…This principle is based on the idea that cities require green open spaces to ensure sustainability of the processes and functions of the different aspects of city life. This concept is also important in the smart cities paradigm [98]. Geddes highlighted the importance of effectively using an interdisciplinary approach in developing knowledge to create useful synergies and connections between the different disciplines and subject areas.…”

From “Government to Governance”? A Systematic Literature Review of Research for Urban Green Infrastructure Management in Latin America

“…A number of publications referenced long traditions of bottom-up community management in Chile and in Mexico that had been sidelined by government or marketled management practices in previous decades; these historical initiatives tended to be either a product of early twentieth century urban policies (Gurovich Weisman, 2003; Yáñez Andrade and Deichler, 2018) or longstanding indigenous traditions (González and Guillen, 2015;Pabello and Nasupcialy, 2019). The fact that co-governance initiatives are more recent in the literature (Figure 4) reflects claims in a number of the publications that government initiatives and community initiatives tend to be siloed, and there is a general lack of interaction and communication between them (Chelleri et al, 2016;Betancurt et al, 2017;Diep et al, 2019;Vieira and Panagopoulos, 2020). For example, Anguelovski et al (2019) explored the construction of an urban belt as an "antisprawl" measure in Medellin, during the process of which the municipality directly destroyed community gardens and relocated residents, before creating its own "community" schemes with the aim of supplying high-income markets in other parts of the city (p. 150).…”