Chapter 11 - Urban sustainability assessment tools: toward integrating smart city indicators

Abstract

Urban sustainability assessment tools are increasingly used to inform planning and policymaking in cities. Despite being diverse in their scale, scope, and clientele, their common goal is dealing with challenges related to global change and sustainability. In the meantime, it is increasingly recognized that utilizing smart solutions, enabled by advances in information and communication technologies, is critical for accelerating progress on achieving sustainability. It is, therefore, essential to integrate smart city principles into urban sustainability assessment tools. Accordingly, the main question that we aim to address in this chapter is whether sustainability assessment tools cover smart city indicators. To answer this question, we first extract a list of smart city indicators from a wide range of existing tools for assessing city smartness. Next, we examine seven globally well-known sustainability assessment tools to find out the level of correspondence between their indicators and those extracted from smart city assessment tools. The examined urban sustainability assessment tools belong to the BREEAM, LEED, and CASBEE family and are used for performance assessment at the neighborhood and/or city scales. Results show that, overall, there is a lack of correspondence between smart city and urban sustainability assessment tools. In particular, there is a glaring lack of coverage of smartness indicators related to the economy, governance, and quality of life dimensions. Some promising results were, however, found regarding the inclusion of smartness indicators related to the environment and mobility dimensions. Results show that the recently developed LEED for cities and communities tools have made good efforts to include smartness indicators related to these two dimensions. This chapter concludes by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the selected tools and making some recommendations for future research.