Rocco Papa

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.

Smart and Resilient Cities. A Systemic Approach for Developing Cross-sectoral Strategies in the Face of Climate Change

Climate change is considered one of the main environmental issues challenging contemporary cities. Meanwhile, urban development patterns and the growth of urban population represent the main contributors to climate change, affecting the total energy consumptions and the related greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, a breakthrough in current urban development patterns is required to counterbalance the climate-related issues. This study focuses on the Smart City and Resilient City concepts; in detail, based on the review of existing literature, it analyzes the synergies between the two concepts, highlighting how the Smart City concept is more and more widely interpreted as a process addressed to make cities “more livable and resilient and, hence, able to respond quicker to new challenges” (Kunzmann, 2014). Nevertheless, current initiatives to improve cities’ smartness and resilience in the European cities are very fragmented and operational tools capable to support multi-objective strategies are still at an early stage. To fill this gap, embracing a systemic perspective, the main characteristics of a smart and resilient urban system have been identified and arranged into a conceptual model. The latter represents a preliminary step for the development of an operational tool capable to guide planners and decision-makers in carrying out multi-objective strategies addressed to enhance the response capacities of complex urban systems in the face of climate change.

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.

Energy and Climate Change Polices in Europe: Overview and Selected Examples from a Spatial Planning Perspective

The challenges imposed by the changing climate and the energy-driven developments are very complex and need to be addressed from the global to the local scale. In the last decades, this issue has attracted the attention of policy makers at all levels of government, attempting to adopt an integrated and adaptive energy and climate strategy. This paper reviews and analyzes the main efforts that have been made in Europe to secure a transition toward a low-carbon and energy—efficiency society from a spatial planning perspective. To this aim, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of selected climate and energy policy documents elaborated at three different levels of governance: the European Union, the national and the local level. At the European level, our analysis shows that very limited attention has given to spatial planning as a strategy to reduce or ameliorate the impacts of the changing climate. At the national level, while mitigation policies are more inclined towards techno-centric solutions, adaptation policies partly recognize the anticipatory role of spatial planning to play in promoting robust adaptation measures. At the local level, where most of the causes and the effects of the changing climate are manifested, technological options are often well integrated with spatial planning. However, even at the local scale, energy and climate policies focus mainly on individual sectors or urban functions rather than systemic changes.

Nuove tecnologie, comportamenti individuali e stili di vita: il ruolo delle comunità locali nella realizzazione della smart city

The paper deals with demands of urban regeneration and local communities aspirations, drawing on the notion of smart city. It offers a trans-disciplinary methodological framework, mobilizing social and technology studies, to support the smart city as a new alliance between environmental sustainability and human activities. The paper is based on a research work carried out by the authors in Naples about life styles and energy consumption reduction strategies

European Cities Dealing with Climate Issues: Ideas and Tools for a Better Framing of Current Practices.

Contemporary cities have to deal with numerous challenges, from the growth and aging of urban populations to the scarcity of resources; from environmental degradation to climate change. The latter, also due to the increasing severity of climate-related impacts on urban areas, is widely considered one of the most urgent challenges for urban development in the near future: cities are the main contributors to energy consumption and GHG emissions, paying, at the same time, the highest price for the climate impacts. Thus, climate issues have gained increasing importance in the last decades, both in terms of the metaphors coined by scholars relative to urban future (low-carbon cities, transition cities, smart cities, resilient cities, etc.) and in terms of the initiatives undertaken on different institutional levels. Unfortunately, mitigation and adaptation are generally regarded as two different approaches, neglecting the potential synergies and trade-offs between the related strategies. Hence, based on the growing awareness of the need for mainstreaming mitigation and adaptation policies at city level, this study will provide an overview of the state of the art of the mitigation and adaptation initiatives in Italian metropolitan cities. Then, focusing on the concepts of the “smart” and the “resilient” city – recognized as key concepts for reducing CO 2 emissions and improving the ability of cities to respond to climate impacts – and with reference to a conceptual framework for building up a smart and resilient urban system carried out in previous research works (Papa et al., 2015), the study will examine case studies of the cities of Rotterdam and Barcelona, highlighting how this framework may improve our understanding and, above all, contribute to better integration of the fragmented on-going strategies and initiatives.

Characteristics of Sprawl in the Naples Metropolitan Area. Indications for Controlling and Monitoring Urban Transformations

Naples metropolitan area is one of the largest in Italy, located in the South of the Country with a population of about 4 million inhabitants. Several studies have proposed for this area different spatial metropolitan boundaries but, despite the presence of national regulations, the area is not still defined at administrative level. One of the main characteristics of the area is the high level of unplanned urban expansion, with the consequence of a wide level of fragmentation, an extensive illegal urban development and an incorrect use of the agricultural land. The paper analyze the urbanization process in the study area and proposes a monitoring tool of the sprawl phenomenon, with a smart spatial planning approach.

Editorial Preface. Smart Cities Challenges: Smart Environment for Sustainable Resource Management

Volume 7 is dedicated to the challenges of the Smart City and will focus during the three issues of the volume on three different challenges aspects. In this first issue the main theme is smart environment for sustainable resource management. The second issue will focus on the process of planning for smart cities, dealing with new urban challenges, while the third issue will be focusing on the smart communities between e-governance and social participation.