Conceptualizing, Modeling and Simulating Sustainability as Tools to Implement Urban Smartness

The smart cities initiative does not consist of filling our cities with tech gadgets, cameras and sensors for the purpose of monitoring and controlling both citizens and urban environment. The smart cities movement is not a marketplace for companies and businesses to sell their ICT products and services to governments. The smart cities objective is not to target the use of urban technology as an end in itself but as a tool towards more citizen-centric cities. Therefore, smart cities are not a big brother watching citizens but an inclusive and participatory arena for local governments and all interested stakeholders (including citizens) to co-create communities that can offer development opportunities to everyone and quality of live, no matter social group, age, or gender. This is the true objective of smart cities, which sometimes gets lost, forgotten or becomes shadowed by an excess of technology. But, how to achieve such a challenging objective? Fortunately, just recently, a definition on smart cities has been agreed by international standardization bodies which, so far, are the ones paving the way regarding concepts, terminology and general understanding of the smart cities movement. This novel definition builds on the sustainability concept, promotes urban development in good harmony with resilience, and uses technology only as a way for cities to measure their smartness and improve their performance. The author, aware of the big step forward that this internationally acknowledged definition is, takes the opportunity that this new piece of formally structured knowledge offers to elaborate a first-of-a-kind framework to conceptualize, model and simulate sustainability, and its practical implementation while promoting urban development and resilience to achieve higher performance levels of urban smartness.