Carmela Gargiulo

Towards an urban planners’ perspective on Smart City

The concept of “Smart City”, providing a solution for making cities more efficient and sustainable, has been quite popular in recent years, encouraging reflections, ideas, researches and projects for a “smart” urban development. A smart city is generally meant as a city capable of joining “competitiveness” and “sustainability”, by integrating different dimensions of development and addressing infrastructural investments able to support economic growth as well as the quality of life of communities, a more careful management of natural resources, a greater transparency and participation to decision-making processes. Based on those assumptions, this contribution tackle the controversial subject of Smart City, starting from the review of the scientific Italian and international literature that, from the Eighties to the Nineties, has been largely focused on ICTs and their impacts on urban development. Then, the focus shifts on the large debate on smart cities that has been developing from the beginning of 2000s and on the numerous institutional initiatives up to now implemented by the European Union for building up the Smart City. Finally, the article highlights how, despite these efforts, a shared definition of the term is still missing and current approaches to the issue are still very heterogeneous; it emphasizes, on the opposite, the key-role that urban planning, grounding on a holistic approach to cities’ development, should play in coordinating and integrating urban policies addressed to building up a Smart City.

EU Smart City Governance

In recent years European Commission has developed a set of documents for Members States tracing, directly or indirectly, recommendations for the transformation of the European city. The paper wants to outline which future EU draws for the city, through an integrated and contextual reading of addresses and strategies contained in the last documents, a future often suggested as Smart City. Although the three main documents (Cohesion Policy 2014-2020 of European Community, Digital Agenda for Europe and European Urban Agenda) face the issue of the future development of European cities from different points of view, which are respectively cohesion social, ICT and urban dimension, each of them pays particular attention to urban and territorial dimension, identified by the name of Smart City. In other words, the paper aims at drawing the scenario of evolution of Smart Cities that can be delineated through the contextual reading of the three documents. To this end, the paper is divided into three parts: the first part briefly describes the general contents of the three European economic plan tools; the second part illustrates the scenarios for the future of the European city contained in each document; the third part seeks to trace the evolution of the Smart Cities issue developed by the set of the three instruments, in order to provide the framework of European Community for the near future of our cities.

Urban Systems and Energy Consumptions: A Critical Approach

City transformations are also due to the development of new energy sources, which have influenced economy and lifestyles, as well as the physical and functional organization of urban systems. Cities are the key place where it is need to act for the achievement of strategic environmental objectives, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy saving. The hard resolution of these challenges depends on several factors: their multidimensional nature, the change of the economic and settlement development model, and also the complexity of the relationships between the elements that constitute the urban systems and that affect energy consumption. According to this awareness the Project Smart Energy Master for the energy management of territory financed by PON 04A2_00120 R & C Axis II, from 2012 to 2015 has been developed: it is aimed at supporting local authorities in the development of strategies for the reduction of energy consumption through actions designed to change behavior (in terms of use and energy consumption) and to improve the energy efficiency of equipment and infrastructure. With the goal of describing some of the results of the methodological phase of this project, this paper proposes a review of the major studies on the issue of energy consumption at the urban scale in the first section; in the second section the outcomes of the first phase of the development of the comprehension/interpretive model related to the identification of the set of physical/environmental variables at urban scale, that most affect the energy consumption, are described; the third makes a critical review of the reference scientific literature, characterised by a too sectoral approach, compared to the complexity of the topic.

Towards the Definition of the Urban Saving Energy Model (UrbanSEM)

European cities are essential actors for transition to a low carbon society on a 2050 horizon. Urban activities account for 80 % of energy consumption in Europe as well as most GHG emissions. The need for a new paradigm based on energy efficiency and saving thus represents both a challenge and an opportunity to local authorities who have to deal with the complexity of urban systems and energy issues. In light of this realization, the Smart Energy Master project conducted by the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II aims to develop a model of governance for local energy saving and efficiency. One of the results of this research project is the Urban Saving Energy Model aimed at integrating the different subsystems in which a city can be structured with energy consumption at a neighborhood scale. This paper describes the model in question and some of the results achieved by applying the UrbanSEM to three Naples neighborhoods.

Climate Change and Energy Sustainability. Which Innovations in European Strategies and Plans

In recent years, the effects of climate change on urban areas have pushed more and more policy-makers and urban planners to deal with the management of territorial transformations in a systemic and multi-sector perspective, due to the complexity of the issue. In order to enhance the urban governance of climate change and cope with environmental sustainability, the concept of resilience can be used. In this perspective, the present work has a double purpose: on the one hand to reflect on he need to adopt a new comprehension/interpretive approach to the study of the city, which embraces the concept of resilience, and on the other hand to perform a reading of European strategies and plans oriented to mitigate the effects of climate change and to achieve the goals of energy and environmental sustainability. This paper describes some of the results of the knowledge framework of the Project Smart Energy Master for the energy management of territory financed by PON 04A2_00120 R & C Axis II, from 2012 to 2015 aimed at supporting local authorities in the development of strategies for the reduction of energy consumption through actions designed to change behavior (in terms of use and energy consumption) and to improve the energy efficiency of equipment and infrastructure. The paper is divided into three parts: the first is oriented to the definition of the new comprehension/interpretive approach; the second illustrates a series of recent innovations in planning tools of some European States due to the adoption of the concept of resilience; the third, finally, describes and compares the most innovative energy and environmental strategies aimed at contrasting and/or mitigate the effects of climate change, promoted in some European and Italian cities.

City and mobility: towards an integrated approach to resolve energy problems

The issue of integration between city, mobility and energy plays a central role in the current EU policies, aimed at achieving energy saving targets, independence from fossil fuels and enhance of the urban systems resilience, but the strategies of the single states are, however, still far from its implementation. This paper proposes a reading of the current policies and of the recent initiatives aimed at improving the energy efficiency of settlements, implemented at both Community and national level, aimed at laying the groundwork for the definition of an integrated approach between city and mobility to resolve energy problem. Therefore, the paper is divided into six parts. The first part describes the transition from the concept of sustainability to the concept of resilience and illustrates the central role played by this one in the current urban and territorial research; the second part briefly analyzes the main and more recent European directives related to city, mobility and energy, while the third part describes how the energy problem is afforded in the current programming and planning tools. The fourth and fifth parts, are intended to describe the innovative practices promoted in some European and Italian cities concerning energy efficiency aimed at the integration between urban and transport systems. The last part of the paper, finally, deals with the definition of a new systemic approach for achieving objectives of energy sustainability. This approach aims at integrating strategies and actions for strategies of mobility governance, based on the certain assumption that the core for the most part of energy problems is mainly represented in medium and large cities.

Urban Retrofit and Resilience. The challenge of Energy Efficiency and Vulnerability

Urban retrofit is becoming increasingly established as one of the most effective solutions to contain the energy consumption of the existing building stock, to reduce vulnerability to natural and man-made risk and generally improve the quality of built space. However, the planning of retrofit interventions at urban scale should take account of the actual feasibility of measures lest they remain only on paper. This contribution supplies an overview of the many issues related to the subject of urban regeneration, proposing a procedure to identify practical interventions to minimize costs and maximize benefits, in terms of energy efficiency, an increase in resilience and improvement in the quality of the building stock. This procedure was applied to a case study of a neighborhood in the city of Naples, a high-density urban area which is particularly vulnerable to volcanic and seismic risk, and to risks due to climate change.

Cities and Energy Consumption: a Critical Review

The relationship between cities and energy consumption has been of great interest for the scientific community for over twenty years. Most of the energy consumption, indeed, occurs in cities because of the high concentration of human activities. Thus, cities are responsible for a big share of carbon dioxide emissions (CO 2 ). However, the debate on this topic is still open, mainly because of the heterogeneity of published studies in the selection, definition and measurement of the urban features influencing energy consumption and CO 2 emissions, as well as in the choice of the energy sectors to be considered, in the territorial scale of analysis, and in the geographical distribution of the sample. Therefore, the goal of this research is to systematize and compare the approach, methodology and results of the relevant literature on the relationship between cities and energy consumption over the last twenty years. Furthermore, this critical review identifies the knowledge gap between what is known and what is still under debate and, based on that, it proposes a conceptual framework that will help to outline a new direction for future research and support local policy makers in the definition of strategies and actions that can effectively reduce urban energy use and CO 2 emissions.

Urban Transformation and Property Value Variation. The Role of HS Stations

The article aims reading and interpreting the positive externalities, especially in terms of urban redevelopment, connected to the building of node/station of the High Speed railway network. The measure of the variations of the real estate values, carried out through the analysis of numerous European and Italian experiences, is considered as a synthetic indicator of urban quality consequent to the strengthening or establishment of a new High Speed station. The identification of relationships between High Speed station, residential property values and typologies of cities (role and urban specialization) and urban context in which the station are located is one of the conclusions of this work. In accord with the aim, this paper is organized in three principal parts. The first part identifies the relation between urban transformations, urban quality and property values and provides a scientific frame of the studies on the relationships between accessibility increase and property values. Indeed, the results of many studies and reports reveal that the reduction in generalized cost of transport and the increase of accessibility related to the implementation of new infrastructure such as a railway station, in some cases have impacted significantly on increasing demand for space in the surrounding areas and, accordingly, on property values. The second part proposes the reading of some experiences of building of High Speed stations in some European and Italian cities, with a focus on the case of Roma-Napoli High Speed line. The choice of cases was made using criteria that seem to give a guarantee of representativeness to the variety and multiplicity of experiences. In particular, the criteria used are: geographic location of railway line (selecting cases with different geographical locations); city-node size (choosing different types of cities for size and population), functional role of the city-node, timing for the completion of railway line (fully in operation, partly in operation or not yet in operation). Besides, the description of each case is divided into: summary description of the characteristics of the HS railway line; description of the main features of cities that represent the nodes of the selected routes; identify the characteristics of the surrounding context of the railway station; measurement of the change in property values in the surrounding context of the railway station due to HS link. The third part provides a comparative outline of the effects of High Speed stations on property values and the urban typologies and characteristics that influence this relation. The first result of this article is a comparative framework between all study cases. In conclusion, the comparative reading shows that the effect from opening of the High Speed railway stations on property values is valuable in cases where it contributes significantly to raising the socio-economic and the quality conditions of spaces.

Effect of Urban Greenspaces on Residential Buildings’ Energy Consumption: Case Study in a Mediterranean Climate

The paper is part of the scientific research sector concerning the government of urban transformations in order to promote efficiency and reduction of energy consumption in urban areas. In this study, urban greenspaces (green areas) are proposed as a strategy for cities to achieve both urban sustainability and resilience while addressing the issues of energy reduction and climate change adaptation. The study investigated the microclimate impact of greenspaces on the cooling energy needs of residential buildings in Naples, Italy, given different urban fabric characteristics by coupling the microclimate model ENVI-met with the building energy model EnergyPlus. The charts resulted from the study could represent an useful decision support tool for urban planners and policy-makers to locate and size greenspaces based on their effectiveness in terms of energy consumption reduction. The study found that—in general—a medium-size green area (4900 m2) would reduce the cooling energy consumption by 9.20% which is more than double the effect of a large green area (32,400 m2).