From Intelligent to Smart Cities brings together recent and leading research on transitioning to smart cities from intelligent cities. Intelligent cities are multi-layered systems that focus on integrating institutional capacities within cities. This focuses on how institutions can cooperate employing advanced communication techniques. An example of an intelligent cities’ activity would be an innovation cluster, similar to Ann Arbor SPARK. Smart cities represent a “next-generation” advancement from intelligent cities.
Smart cities are defined along six axes. Imagine criteria that could be measured, monitored and reported in relation to these six axes:
- Smart economy,
- Smart mobility,
- Smart environment,
- Smart people,
- Smart living, and
- Smart governance.
This can result in sustainable urban growth and economic development. An example of an intelligent cities’ activity would be the global popularity of bike-sharing programs.
From Intelligent to Smart Cities includes an editorial and five papers from distinguished experts in the field of sustainable urban growth and economic development.
Yet, what From Intelligent to Smart Cities is missing is a systematic approach for measuring, reporting and verifying natural resource impacts from these smart cities activities.
Now imagine a couple years from now if communities, neighborhoods, and cities could “audit and certify their natural resource impacts to independent third-party standards similar to carbon standards like VCS and CCB”.
This could be a reasonable manner to further develop smart cities into places that have a positive impact on our Earth’s current ecological triple threat. This triple threat we currently face is:
- Biodiversity loss,
- Nutrient cycling degradation (greenhouse gases, Montreal Protocol gases, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc.), and
- Water quality degradation.
In From Intelligent to Smart Cities the links are clear that a city’s endowment includes physical capital, intellectual capital, and social capital. Yet the challenge that remains to be addressed, as cities move from intelligent to smart cities, is to incorporate natural capital into a city’s endowment and accounting frameworks.
Jurisdictional-level accounting of the triple-threat of biodiversity loss, nutrient cycling, and water quality degradation will require us to expand upon the trends towards smart cities described in From Intelligent to Smart Cities to include monitoring, reporting, and verification of cities’ natural capital endowments and requirements.
How to order:
From Intelligent to Smart Cities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 978-1-84971-389-4
Authors: Mark Deakin and Husam Al Waer
This book was originally published as a special issue of Intelligent Buildings International.
Gabriel Thoumi, CFA, LEED AP, is a natural resource scientist and financial consultant.
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