Christina Kakderi (p)

Over the last 15 years an important and ambitious philosophy/trend has emerged in the field of strategic planning and urban management, namely ‘vision zero’. Vision zero (or zero vision) refers to urban strategies setting impressive targets of zero negative impacts, transforming cities into fully viable places for their residents, offering them high quality of living (Komninos, 2016; Zaman and Lehmann, 2013). Such strategies can be implemented in various city domains setting the goal to eliminate the respective urban threat (e.g. deaths from traffic accidents, CO2 emissions, waste, criminality, etc.). Despite the growing literature of the vision zero paradigm in different fields, these domain-specific strategies seem to develop in parallel, with no discernible effort for conceptual or practical integration.

Their ambitious but also multi-dimensional character, as strategies aiming to tackle complex urban problems and alter the behavior of both policy makers and users, has found common ground and was unavoidably linked with the use of smart city technologies and infrastructure but also with the scope of the smart/intelligent cities concept as an umbrella term. Much like the vision zero philosophy, smart city design approaches can be identified either in formal strategies or emerging ‘bottom-up’ initiatives and can be applied to different scales and city domains (Komninos et al., 2014). It is an achievement that requires a strategic approach of coordination and integration of processes and forces with the aim to develop collective and spatial intelligence in order to address composite challenges within a particularly complex urban environment.

We believe that vision zero strategies for different urban domains share the same general principles and present many similarities (Kakderi, 2019). The identification of common ground among such strategies can facilitate cross-sectoral policy transfer and more importantly become the backbone of a holistic vision zero strategy for urban places. Furthermore, the investigation the use of relevant smart city technologies, infrastructures, as well as services and applications for the purposes of urban zero vision strategies can also contribute to this purpose. In this direction, the paper aims a) to adopt a broad perspective of the vision zero strategy contributing to the generic definition of the vision zero concept and b) investigate its position in the smart cities paradigm and identify smart city enabled technologies and practices that could empower design and implementation of such extremely ambitious strategies.

Nicos Komninos (p)

The environmental sustainability challenge is not new. Concerns about the impact of human activity on the environment have been growing constantly since the mid-20th century. The projected global population growth, intense urbanisation, the adoption of energy and materials-intensive industrial processes in all countries are drivers towards ecological imbalance. Therefore, most solutions for sustainable growth focus on the way we build cities, manage industries and expand transportation infrastructure. The paper starts from discussing the big sustainability challenges of fossil fuels, greenhouse emissions and climate change, pollution of natural ecosystems, waste and water management in cities. Then, we examine two cases: (a) the current sustainability practices or how solutions are organised by smart growth city planning, New Urbanism, and Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design (LEED-ND) principles, and (b) the logic of sustainability that goes together with smart cities, sensors and the Internet of Things, and the new science of environmental applications. We show that the smart everything-smart city paradigm is changing the normative aspects of environmental sustainability. It is opening up new routes to sustainable futures and new ways in which environmental sustainability can be achieved. Instead of planning focused on land uses, compact cities, buildings, and green infrastructures, this paradigm proposes solutions that motivate citizens’ behaviour towards dematerialisation, renewable energy, limiting pollution. Awareness, behaviour change and optimisation are leading the sustainable use of resources.

Anastasia Panori (p)

Cities have been experiencing significant transformations during the last decades, by introducing novel approaches to problem-solving and governance paradigms. The adoption of smart systems and technologies in cities was made through an interdisciplinary process that connects theories, methodologies, and practices from diverse research fields, like informatics and data science, urban planning and development, engineering, economics, knowledge and innovation management. In this context, the ‘smart city’ or ‘intelligent city’ paradigm has been widely used to describe an enhanced model of urban development, where traditional and disruptive elements coexist and interact. Having this in mind, the aim of this chapter is to identify and discuss different layers of intelligence in smart cities. It is based on extensive literature review. We try revealing how different layers of intelligence are activated by awareness, collaboration, and positive externalities and the connections between them. Identifying architectures of intelligence is an essential step towards making the most of smart cities. Also, it is important to investigate whether is feasible to define an overall architecture of intelligence in cities and smart ecosystems, encompassing aspects of human, artificial, and collective and collaborative capabilities.