Smart Campus: Recent Advances and Future Challenges for Action Research on Territorial Sustainability

Abstract

The integration of technology for campus sustainability emerges as a new way forward to bridging the perceived gap between science and society. The perspective of carbon fossil resources depletion and the likely major impact of climate change fundamentally question the processes of energy production and consumption. Often termed "energy transition", their change requires an important sharing of knowledge to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of innovations. This chapter aims at addressing the green campus revolution as an issue of socio-technical learning and collective intelligence. In this regard, our ongoing research analyses the major fields of territorial ecology underpinning the Smart Campus concepts. To what extent do they cover the latest in innovative technologies and services that enable the campuses to produce green energy and to optimize its uses for sustainable living and transportation? First, a review of existing research on these systems called "smart grids" will show the recent advances in their experimentation within the territories of university institutions. Among them, the project of Smart Campus carried out by the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines is proving to be of particular interest. Gaining ground in academic, industrial and public works, its collaborative platform connects a solar photovoltaic system integrated into green buildings to the lighting of local campuses and to electric car sharing between their areas.

Smart practices in HEIs and the contribution to the SDGs: implementation in Brazilian university

“…The progress of a smart campus indicates similar progress in several sustainability indicators (Negreiros et al , 2020) which consequently leverages the achievement of the SDGs once a well-known relationship is found in the contribution of smart technologies to the construction of more sustainable university campuses (Némoz, 2015; Villegas-Ch et al , 2019; Kostepen et al , 2020; Adenle et al , 2021; Ceccarini et al , 2021). By contributing to lifelong learning practices (Mazutti et al , 2020) and collective learning (Némoz, 2015), campus safety (Ceccarini et al , 2021), energy efficiency (Negreiros et al , 2020), sustainable mobility (Torres-Sospedra et al , 2015) among others, smart practices on university campuses are closely connected to the SDGs as they are multidisciplinary and include many dimensions of campus life, especially regarding quality education (SDG 4), innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9) and sustainable cities (SDG 11).…”

Future educational environment – Identification of smart campus topic trends using text mining

“…Smart campus studies could pay attention to the effects of two highly dynamic components of a smart campus: changing stakeholder needs, and the advancement of smart technology (Hassanain et al ., 2022). This further calls for a socio-technical perspective (Némoz, 2015) in the study of smart campuses. The results also indicate that smart campus research is not exhaustive due to the above-mentioned stakeholders' need volatility and is a dynamic and progressive technology domain (Zhang et al ., 2022).…”

Facilitating Successful Smart Campus Transitions: A Systems Thinking-SWOT Analysis Approach

“…Although these transitions are on-going, there is little evidence to show that the views of the users are being incorporated during the decision-making processes which govern its conceptualization, design, and implementation stages [23]. Scholars have observed the unidirectional nature of the Smart City implementation programs [24,25]. This is despite the need for Smart Campus projects to be mostly human-centered and user driven [26,27].…”