Development of an integrated sustainability model for resilient cities featuring energy, environmental, social, governance and pandemic domains

Abstract

This research introduces a novel integrated model with a comprehensive approach to develop and characterize smart cities. Strategic planning for sustainable and resilient cities has become an urgent necessity, given the global challenges around the environment and sustainable development. This paper answers the questions of what does a smart city look like and which parameters to prioritize in developing smart cities. This model incorporates important domains such as energy, environmental, social, governance and pandemic resilience domains in addition to other domains, carefully selected to ensure a wholistic approach. Each domain is assessed using four primary performance indicators, totaling 32 indicators, which are used to evaluate the smartness of a city. This conceptual framework is deployed and applied to 20 cities worldwide. Principal component analysis and further statistical assessments are used to determine the interrelationship and intrarelationships between the indicators of the various domains in order to determine a causal-effect matrix. The results show that the governance domain is strongly correlated with the energy and environment domains with the correlation coefficient (R) values of 0.86 and 0.87 respectively. There is a mild positive relationship between smart governance and smart society indexes. In fact, the R value of 0.7 highlights that smart governance does positively correlate and lead to smarter societies. The average smart energy index ratio is 0.26, which reflects immense opportunities for improvements in this sector. The half of the cities in the study are below average, while the other half exceed the average smart index ratio for the energy index. The smart governance index ratio is 0.44, and the cities vary on this front between 0.17 and 0.59. Montreal is the city with the highest smart governance index ratio, whereas Cairo has the lowest. This study provides the concept of smart city in a quantitative, empirical and comprehensive manner, highlighting that smart governance, smart society and pandemic resilience are critical aspects to the development of smart cities.