Abstract
In recent years, there has been a wide diffusion of two concepts, the Sustainable City and the Smart City. Considering the several definitions of Smart City, it arises that the two concepts can have many commonalities. For instance, the most obvious refers to the role of ICT—main characteristic of the Smart City—for reaching the goal of sustainability. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to compare the current status of environmental sustainability in some Italian cities with the strategies regarding the “Environment” dimension, which are adopted in accordance with the Smart City concept. In the first part, the paper proposes a brief summary of the cities surveyed from an environmental perspective. In the second part, the methodology implemented during research is illustrated. The third part highlights the results obtained in relation both to the definition of the cities’ status in terms of environmental sustainability and of assessing their propensity towards the implementation of a “smart” approach in the Environmental dimension, thanks also to a detailed analysis of projects underway in the various cities. Finally, the last part is aimed at highlighting the specific experiments underway and challenges identified during the research.
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- 1.
- 2.
The method for aggregating the composite index was selected for its ability to immediately use and interpret its results (Massoli et al. 2014).
- 3.
Most selected initiatives have a high technological content, even if in some cases, activities that do not directly involve ICT devices and products were chosen, because they can still be traced back to the Smart Environment dimension, such as sustainable energy and climate action plans, which are aimed at making cities more sustainable even through the use of ICTs.
- 4.
Istat measures the total losses in municipal drinking water grids by subtracting the volumes dispensed to the volumes fed into the network.
- 5.
Referring to the classification criteria for initiatives used during the research, which foresees that the Smart Environment dimension include only initiatives directly related to environmental aspects, thus leaving out interventions that, although have positive impact on the environment, are classified under other dimensions of smartness. Such as the case of sustainable mobility initiatives aimed at reducing pollution, which were not accounted for because they are classified under the Smart Mobility dimension
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Acknowledgements
The authors have made a joint contribution to the paper’s conception and design, background and methodological approach to the problem. Rosaria Battarra designed the results on experiments underway in the Smart Environment dimension and concluding remarks (§§ 4.2 and 5). Fulvia Pinto developed the section on urban and environmental characteristics of the Italian Metropolitan Cities (§ 3) and Maria Rosa Tremiterra designed the knowledge framework and the Environment dimension’s status of Italian cities (§§ 1 and 4.1).
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Battarra, R., Pinto, F., Tremiterra, M.R. (2018). Indicators and Actions for the Smart and Sustainable City: A Study on Italian Metropolitan Cities. In: Papa, R., Fistola, R., Gargiulo, C. (eds) Smart Planning: Sustainability and Mobility in the Age of Change. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77682-8_6
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