Published in Sustainability, this research paper focuses on pathways towards the digital and green transition. We assess a generic pathway for the transformation of industry ecosystems in cities and regions based on processes of “prioritisation”, “ecosystem identification”, and “platform-based digital and green transition”. Our interest in the transformation of activity-based ecosystems by the twin transition, digital and green, is both theoretical and methodological.
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Intelligent Cities – Smart Cities – Innovation Ecosystems
Contemporary smart cities involve a very high number of software applications and hardware devices that connect to the physical and social space of cities and form complex ecosystems in different knowledge and activity domains (transportation, logistics, healthcare, housing, industry, governance, social care, and many more). In this context, smart cities can be considered multi-layered complex systems, systems of systems, that provide ubiquitous access
This paper published in Land describes a model to assess the feasibility of transition of city districts to self-sufficient net-Zero-Energy Districts (NZEDs), based on locally produced renewable energy suitable for cities. It also aims to identify threshold conditions that allow for a city district to become a self-sufficient NZED using smart city systems, renewable energy, and nature-based solutions.
A new paper “Three Decades of Research on Smart Cities‘ by Ayyoob Sharifi, Zaheer Allam, Bakhtiar Feizizadeh, and Hessam Ghamari, published in Sustainability 2021, 13, 7140, gives an overview of the structure and trends in the literature on smart cities. It is a bibliometric analysis and science mapping using VOSviewer and CiteSpace to identify the thematic focus of over 5000 articles indexed in the Web of Science.
The whitepaper “Understanding Resiliency: What It Means to be a Resilient City and Tools to Support’ provides an analysis on the necessity for resiliency strategies and the challenges of implementing resiliency. Additionally it presents existent digital tools to support cities and territories to build more resilient, sustainable and safe places to live.
The recently published white paper on “Intelligence and Co-creation in Smart Specialisation Strategies’ outlines some key conclusions from the Online S3 project. The project was funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. According to the authors, Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3), linking regional, national, and EU policy frameworks, regulations and strategy objectives require a variety of data and methods to define problems, priorities and objectives, and use suitable policy instruments.
This paper opens a discussion on the transformational impact that the pandemic brought to the sector of mobility within the urban environment. The analysis focuses on the promotion of sustainability, the smart growth agenda, and the acceleration towards the smart city paradigm. The authors conceive the disruption caused by the pandemic as an opportunity for change towards sustainability, since the transport sector in many cities causes negative environmental and health costs.