Smart Energy in the Smart City

This paper proposes a re-thought of the concept of urban smartness, particularly referring to the energy component. Recognizing that the new technologies, which are the most popular aspect of smartness, can play a fundamental role in the new approach, it has been suggested that we consider them in an adoptive way rather than in an adjunctive way, as it is commonly intended in the general sense of a smart city. According to this vision, in the first part of the paper, a new concept of smartness is proposed (SmartNESS: Smart New Energy Saving System). This concept is also related to the possibility of identifying some leading urban functions that can play a strategic role in improving urban smartness. In this sense, in the second part, tourism is considered as a drive function able to make cities more efficient and attractive if it will be integrated inside the urban governance process. The third part of the paper highlights how the rationalization and reduction of energy consumption is one of the essential fields to rely on in order to improve the smartness of a city. This part provides an overview of the most significant initiatives that are being developed on energy efficiency, and investigates some cases particularly innovative addressing the issue with an integrated and non-sectorial approach. Through the analyzed experiences, some possible intervention strategies to integrate the issues of energy efficiency in urban planning are suggested in the conclusive part of the paper.

Over the last few years there has been a growing demand for more liveable cities, and the notion of “urban smartness” is thus attracting the attention of both policy-makers and academicians. Among many different definitions, the “Smart City” by Giffinger et al. (2007), a functional model with six drivers of urban smartness (economy, environment, governance, living, mobility and people), appears as the most widely recognized. Within this context, increasing attention has been devoted to the “Energy” dimension concerning renewable energy, energy consumption, and energy policy. The present chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the relation between smartness and energy at the urban scale, specifically focusing on the 103 Italian NUTS3 province capitals. It mainly investigates how and to what extent the province capitals differ in terms of “energy” attributes. The chapter is structured into four sections. The introduction is followed by a literature review of the theoretical and empirical studies defining the concept of Smart City and its characteristics, with a specific focus on the “energy” role in a Smart City. Section three presents data and descriptive statistics exploring the role played by “energy” within the 103 Italian NUTS3 province capitals. The last section focuses on discussion and further research.

In spite of having a land occupation of 2 % and accommodating 50 % of the world population, cities produce 80 % of GHG emission and consume 80 % of the world’s resources. Therefore, spatial planning has a key role in creating urban environments that support less energy-intense lifestyles and communities in order to meet the EU’s challenging energy and climate change targets. However, the use of high tech applications is not sufficient: a smarter way of combining tools and approaches that come from the tradition of town and transport planning is required. Spatial planning has a long lasting tradition in defining the shape of urban fabric and the layout of buildings, defining the proper mix of land uses that takes into account the key role of transports. Containing and retrofitting urban sprawl by integrating transport and land use planning will be a considerable part of a new smart approach to city and energy. The new role of land use planning will also be accommodating new forms of distributed energy production in the urban fabric. In addition, planning tools will incorporate incentives aimed at favouring higher energy standards both for new and existing buildings. The technological innovation requires a comprehensive spatial framework, assuming that  the energy point of view is a new challenge for innovating spatial planning.

Debates on sustainable technologies for urban management—be they related to energy, water, transport, or any other major sectors—tend to be restricted to issues about how to support a transition to new and more efficient technologies, as part of a linear path of progress proceeding from old, backward technologies to modern ones. Technologies themselves tend to be treated like black-boxes, somehow exogenously defined by engineering R&D efforts, while societies are mainly conceived of as passive agents, which can, at most, accept or reject them on the basis of their preferences. In our paper we adopt a different perspective, i.e., we start from the acknowledgement of the importance of the work of many distributed agents and micro-learning processes in technological evolutions and innovations as well as from the idea that sustainable solutions are by no means restricted to linear progression from past to future, as they can also encompass returns and recombinations of traditional components and practices together with new ones. After grounding our approach in some of the main contributions from innovation studies as well as in the application of cognitive science to evolutionary studies of technologies, we specifically discuss the possibility to use a multi-agent and multi-indexing ontological system as a device to share and learn technological knowledge across a wide community, thus supporting those micro-learning processes of distributed agents, which—in our perspective—can boost innovation and change in practice. In so doing, we will refer to a case study developed within the EU-funded project ANTINOMOS “A knowledge network for solving real-life water problems in developing countries: bridging contrasts”, which has largely dealt with enhancement and management of local/community-based knowledge for water sector management. The major aim is to create an appropriate learning environment for sharing and for actively generating knowledge through multi-actor synergies. In this paper, the above subject is discussed and carried out with a cross-disciplinary, cross-scale, multi-agent approach, considering the different forms of local knowledge and language involved.

The world’s population is growing constantly and, more importantly, the need for raw materials and food products is growing quickly, as a result of the western development model. The energy-consuming (energivorous) and consumerist nature of this model is being consolidated globally, ignoring both the issue of resource limitations, and the medium-long term environmental consequences (e.g. climate change, water pollution). This development model, in order to maintain its internal integrity and further develop (often at increasing rates of growth), needs to import energy and materials from the external environment and to produce waste and disorder (entropy) in an inexorable slide toward thermodynamic equilibrium. Sustainable development should focus on contrasting these processes as far as possible, and on developing suitable planning praxes. This paper aims to show how to achieve sustainable land-use through local resource evaluation, overturning the “linear” logic of acquisition-consumption-disposal of wastes, in search of circular processes, capable of reducing entropy growth in a social-ecological system. An analysis of the exergetic availabilities of the landscape mosaic demonstrates great potential for exploiting energy supplies from local and renewable sources, thus lessening the system’s overall impact on the global environment.

Energy saving is the most sustainable solution in the long run to achieve the 2020 goals and mobility is one of the highest energy-consuming activities in our towns. The way people move in the urban environment is manageable through several policies, strategies and actions. Parking management is an important strategy in most planning activities, those addressing land use management as well as traffic plans. Private parking lots (usually at the origin of trips) are planned with a minimum standard quantity in most countries, but there are some good examples where a maximum amount of parking is ruled by plans, in order to discourage residents from possessing too many cars! The availability of public parking places (at the destination of the trip) and their fees have a direct influence on modal choice and so on inter-modality, as the economic sustainability of private motorised mobility is also influenced by economic estimations. Several options in managing public parking regulations can influence mobility patterns, such as regarding location, parking fees and time-related policies. The paper proposes a methodology for the analysis of the space-time relations between public parking and individual travel choices. The methodology has been assessed in the case study of Brescia, in northern Italy. First of all, the location and the density of parking areas within the city have been mapped to show the spatial coverage of car parking supply. Then, the time variable has been considered, to illustrate the degree of use of each parking area during the day—thus showing modal choices and their variation in time and space. The results of the analysis can be extended to similar situations as the methodology has a broad application. The final goal of the research, rather than simply monitoring parking use, is to encourage sustainable mobility through the management of parking supply in urban areas and so to foster energy saving policies.

The urban transformation is the result of several decisions made in a variety of temporal and spatial scales, which concern the field of urban planning regarding the location of buildings and activities, position of transport networks, that in fact are more persistent (Morris 1994). The urban transformation generates environmental impacts in terms of soil sealing, energy consumption and urban heat island (Ewing and Rong 2008), which result in consequences on stormwater runoff, on raising the temperature and increasing of CO₂ emissions. From a representation of the state of the art, the present paper defines a composite index called ISUT (index of sustainability of the urban intervention). The ISUT covers all the essential components of the urban design that condition the energy balance equation (Parham and Fariborz 2010). The composite index value is used to propose better strategies to guide the development of local area plans in conjunction with the City’s Plan using an easy data-set which derives from the knowledge of the territory, which is usually already acquired for urban planning tools on a municipal basis.

The landscape impact of renewable energy facilities requires an approach designed to create a new infrastructure network, compatible with the landscape features and with the agricultural production. It is necessary, therefore, to consider the impact of the energy infrastructures, caused by the large size of the involved area, and consequently their influence on the fruition of the surrounding area and, as a result, on its land value. Our thesis aims to highlight the importance of the analyses of the visibility undertaken on a portion of land characterised by its strongly rural features, and to show, through some study cases, how the control and the management of these performances can be transformed into control and management of the visual-perspective relationship between landscape and observer. It is clear that the visual control alone cannot be considered as a total control of the landscape but it can become an important tool for monitoring transformations in specific areas and a useful tool in the territorial planning process.

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.

A comparison between Sardinian strategic plans (SPs) and implementation plans of historic centers (IPHCs) shows that a general lack of coordination and integration among these municipal planning instruments and a sort of a communicative short circuit are taking place. On the one hand, SPs tend to neglect the importance and the intrinsic value of cultural heritage within historic districts, and, consequently, to undervalue the systemic and general potential of interventions (often limited to punctual and fragmented restorations of buildings) in the historic centers; and, on the other hand, IPHCs propose analyses of municipal historic settlement systems characterized by excessively philological and self-referential attitudes. This paper proposes a discussion on the definition and implementation of IPHCs with the general goal of orienting their conservative character, mainly based on the urban settlement system’s restoration and restructuring, in order to generate conditions favorable to local economic and social development, following the strategic planning conceptual framework. Moreover, within the framework of the Regional Landscape Plan (RLP), and after providing the reader with a thorough presentation of some important technical issues related to IPHCs and a discussion on the semantics of the term “ontology,” this paper discusses some key points concerning the ontology of the IPHCs procedure, that is the spatial analysis of the IPHCs and implied planning measures.

In respect to the numerous environmental challenges that cities have to face in the next future, namely to energy issues and to the increasing impacts of climate change, this contribution aims at providing innovative approaches, strategies and tools for improving cities’ response to climate-related issues. According to this aim, the first chapter focuses on the two concepts of vulnerability and resilience, both of them concerned with how systems react to internal and external pressures, highlighting the complementarities between a vulnerability and a resilience-based approach for promoting a sustainable, safe and less energy consuming urban development; then, focusing on current strategies addressing mitigation and adaptation to climate change, the main relationships among current strategies and spatial planning will be explored; finally, an innovative tool for the evaluation of spatial plans at local scale and of built-up areas, capable to assess the overall sustainability of cities’ development paths in the face of climate change, will be presented.

In recent years, through the adoption of strategic planning processes, the main objective of cities and territories is that of becoming smart, it its different declinations, associating original, flexible ad intelligent technological processes. This work describes two researches that, starting from the common basic assumptions, have defined and created evolved frameworks that can generate “smart services” in support of integrated territorial development. The first study focuses on the definition of a usable platform in the ‘cloud’ environment with which integrated “smart services” can be developed. These smart services do not only promote the territory, thus creating value for the public administration as well as facilitating and stimulating the local economy; they also contribute to qualifying some specific management aspects such as those referring, for example, to the service of smart energy, or rather the optimisation, monitoring and remote regulation of production/consumption of energy even by means of service chains that involve manufacturers and service provider. The general objective of the second research, instead, consists of the necessity of providing services based on access to a geo-referenced database that is interoperable and predisposed to evolve towards new development scenarios, containing cartographic information associated with various information on info-mobility and road safety.

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.

The New Cohesion Policy opens to an integrated place-based approach for the improvement of territorial and social cohesion. The issue of territorial impact assessment of regional development policies highlight that data availability, open access to datasets in “near real-time”, participation, knowledge sharing, and assumed importance within the planning process. In this paper we present an application of spatial analysis techniques for evaluation of territorial effects of EU funds starting from open data by ‘open-coesione’. The final scope is to have the opportunity to develop an assessment in the framework of a public debate. According to this issue we developed an empirical approach for context analysis using open-data assumed as a relevant source of information for the measurement of diffused concerns. The application regards an internal area of the Basilicata Region: the Agri Valley, a complex contest in which environmental and agricultural vocation conflicts with the recent development of oil extraction industries (the actual main territorial specialization). The research produced an integrated approach in order to highlight the energy development domain for Agri Valley. In a first stage the balance between fossil/traditional and renewable energies development should consider the traditional manufacts and practice in order to push on community identity and social commitment. This implies—for the planner—the requirement of managing social conflicts and promoting effective procurement in territorial management. The paper describes as a strategy of conflicts resolution an integrated project called an “Energy Museum”. The “Conclusions” at the end of this chapter discusses further applications and perspectives for improving regional development planning, considering the exploitation of open data sources and spatial analysis in one hand and on the Renewable Energy Sources on the other.

Transport and mobility are crucial factors in the process of adaptation of contemporary urban areas to the challenge of sustainable development. In this perspective, however, cities need to perform a more effective integration between a wide range of different policies and planning practices. Together with a more effective integration between transport policy and land-use planning, for instance, cities could take growing advantage by organisational factors, as well as the spreading of new technologies and the related processes of social innovation. Through the description of several project and planning initiatives taking place in Palermo, the fifth Italian city, this paper attempts to explore the potential sinergies between the “hard factors” of mobility—in this case given by the huge programme of infrastructure redevelopment under realisation in the city—with some other dimensions, such as urban regeneration processes, governance and community-led processes of innovation.

Recent outcomes of a trans-disciplinary debate spreading in America, Europe and Asia among scholars and practitioners in spatial planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and Geographic Information Science, propose the concept of Geodesign as a framework for planning and design aiming at addressing some of the most urgent issues of sustainable growth. Geodesign entails the application of methods and techniques for planning sustainable development in an integrated process, from project conceptualization to analysis, simulation and evaluation, from scenario design to impact assessment, in a process including stakeholder participation and collaboration in decision-making strongly relying on the use of digital information technologies. As such, Geodesign may help to put into practice the methodological innovation brought by Strategic Environmental Assessment in planning process that often, so far, failed to be properly implemented. In the light of the above premises, this paper aims at offering critical insights as a contribution to bridge the gap between Geodesign concepts and both spatial planning regulations and practices, with reference to the Italian case study. The analysis is intended to contribute to offer a better understanding of both normative and methodology issues for a fruitful application of Geodesign principles. Making a more explicit linkage between policy principles and planning, may possibly contribute to foster innovation in education, governance and practices to move towards more sustainable processes of savvy growth, which is one of the main goals in smart city governance.

We present three tools as examples of how information and contributions collected from citizens through online services may be meaningfully employed in evaluation and decision-support tools for planning. The whole idea of using “citizens as sensors” has seen remarkable advancements with the advent of the Web 2.0 and mobile technologies. Yet many tools lack explicit, transparent and publicly accessible evaluation models useful for guiding decisions, for prioritising issues, and for assigning resources by the municipal government. We argue that such evaluation models are necessary for the principles of publicity, accountability and equity to be observed by the public authority. The three tools we present here are attempts, in three different fields, to show how this lack may be overcome. The tools (one for urban maintenance, one for evaluation of walkability and one for energy management) are intended to enhance public authority’s capabilities to use “social energies”, to make their actions more efficient, fair and accountable, giving citizen control and oversight of the allocation of resource.