Abstract:
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Current projections indicate that by 2050, two in every three people will live in urban
areas, and that cities will accommodate 3 billion people during this period. Cities are
consuming three-quarters of the world's energy and causing three-quarters of global
pollution. To reduce these impacts, new technologies have been considered in the
development of smart sustainable cities, but technology has not always favoured the idea
of sustainable consumption. To address this issue, we have aimed to focus on identifying
the role of sustainable consumption within implementations of smart cities’ projects
across Europe.
We have selected a set of smart city projects in 76 cities in Europe from CONCERTO
initiatives, Mapping Smart Cities in Europe, Energy Study for the Stockholm Region and
Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas and classified them
according to: smart governance, smart mobility, smart living, smart environment, smart
citizens and smart economy. Furthermore, we established a number of categories for the
classification of the evaluated projects based on their relevance to sustainable
consumption, and considered several solutions for the integration of sustainable
consumption in smart sustainable cities.
The results show that in 18.9% of the projects, sustainable consumption is not relevant at
all. The second classification shows the percentage of the remaining categories where
sustainable consumption is relevant; 8.3% consider sustainable consumption as relevant
even though it was not implemented in the project. These cities aim to achieve a higher
level of sustainable consumption, which is expected to be included in future projects. If
they keep themselves in this category, their behavioural consumption patterns will not
change and the impact of citizens on the cities will remain the same. The majority of the
projects, 54.2%, implemented technology to reduce consumption but if the projects do
not coincide with the behaviour of citizens, a big rebound effect will occur. 37.5% of the
projects consider relevant sustainable consumption to its full potential and this can change
citizen’s behaviour.
In conclusion, sustainable consumption is relevant in most of the projects analysed, with
new technologies available to help energy savings and reduction of our consumption.
However, if there is a lack of smart consumption from the citizens, the technologies
available might not be sufficient and consumption could increase. One quarter of the
analysed smart cities projects still do not consider the consumption behaviour of the
citizens. This can be changed through campaigns and explanations targeting the
population on how to manage and reduce energy and resource consumption. To reduce
the negative impact of the cities’ growth, projects considering smart sustainable cities
need to integrate sustainable consumption policies that account for citizens' behaviour. |