Implementing Smart Urban Metabolism in the Stockholm Royal Seaport: Smart City SRS

Abstract

Summary For half a century, system scientists have relied on urban metabolism (UM) as a pragmatic framework to support the needed transition toward sustainable urban development. It has been suggested that information and communication technology (ICT) and, more specifically, smart cities can be leveraged in this transition. Given the recent advances in smart cities, smart urban metabolism (SUM) is considered a technology‐enabled evolution of the UM framework, overcoming some of its current limitations. Most significantly, the SUM framework works at high temporal (up to real‐time) and spatial (down to household/individual) resolutions. This article presents the first implementation of SUM in the Smart City Stockholm Royal Seaport R&D project; it further analyzes barriers and discusses the potential long‐term implications of the findings. Four key performance indicators (KPIs) are generated in real time based on the integration of heterogeneous, real‐time data sources. These are kilowatt‐hours per square meter, carbon dioxide equivalents per capita, kilowatt‐hours of primary energy per capita, and share of renewables percentage. These KPIs are fed back on three levels (household, building, and district) on four interfaces, developed for different audiences. The most challenging barrier identified was accessing and integrating siloed data from the different data owners (utilities, building owners, and so forth). It is hard to overcome unless a significant value is perceived. A number of long‐term opportunities were described in the SUM context; among those, it is envisioned that SUM could enable a new understanding of the causalities that govern urbanism and allow citizens and city officials to receive feedback on the system consequences of their choices.

On the social shaping dimensions of smart sustainable cities: A study in science, technology, and society

“…information theory, non-linear dynamics, networks, pattern formation, collective behavior, emergence, adaptation and evolution, and systems theory) are integral to the understanding of, and undertaking the challenges and tracking the changing dynamics pertaining to, such cities. Besides, smart sustainable cities are inherently more complex through the very technologies being used to monitor, understand, analyze, assess, and plan them in terms of their contribution to sustainability (see, e.g., Batty et al 2012;Bibri and Krogstie 2016b, c;Kramers et al 2014;Al Nuaimi et al 2015;Shahrokni et al 2015). Hence, embedding more and more ICT in smart sustainable cities seems to be unavoidable for the sole purpose of handling their complexity in terms of the challenges they are facing and will be dealing with.…”

“…In other words, cities entail human environments where smart solutions in line with the goals of sustainable development can be discovered, created, employed, evaluated, and improved (Höjer and Wangel 2015;Bibri and Krogstie 2016a). In a nutshell, ICT can be leveraged in the needed advancement of sustainable urban development (Shahrokni et al 2015;Neirotti et al 2014) and hence in addressing the challenge of urban sustainability.…”

“…smart buildings, smart transport and logistics, smart city planning, and smart grid) and have reduced concomitant GHG emissions, adding to advancing urban metabolism models (e.g. GeSI 2008;Bibri 2013;Griffiths 2008;Shahrokni et al 2015). ICT has been central to addressing many other challenges facing cities, including those pertaining to planning, transport, mobility (e.g.…”

“…ICT can be further leveraged in the advancement of sustainable urban development (e.g. Shahrokni et al 2015;Bibri and Krogstie 2016b). It has made it possible to approach a range of issues around urban sustainability from a whole new perspective (e.g.…”

Investigating the Role of Virtual Reality in Planning for Sustainable Smart Cities

“…The emergence of virtual reality and ICT assist urban planners to effectively overcome these complexities through visualizing the big data [6]. In fact, visualization through virtual reality has made it possible to approach a range of issues around the sustainable development from a new perspective.…”