N e a r l y Z e r o E n e r g y B u i l d i n g s , S m a r t G r I d s a n d S m a r t C i t i e s
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A smart city should be understood as a cluster of harmonised interventions aimed to
improve city quality, by enhancing its sustainability. Being sustainability a very wide
concept, this definition needs to be further detailed.
The main categories (points of view) assumed for looking at the city quality are:
environment, energy, the way the city performs (services, security, transport, etc.).
According to this approach, choices have to be made to save energy, to use renewable
energy (generated in buildings or in public spaces), and the quality of the urban services
should be improved to react on the public’s requests and to develop adaptive abilities.
Nevertheless, sustainability is also understood as the quality of life itself, as it is
perceived and built up by the community, and, also, as the ability of the city itself of
planning the growth while preserving a correct balance between the built and the natural
environment (green areas); the ability to react to environmental or anthropic
emergencies; ensuring security form all possible points of view.
At a first glance, the smart city concept seems to be nothing really new, but, with respect
to the past, the necessity of building and managing relationships between people, and
buildings, and networks is enormously increased, so that the city ability to connect
becomes a key factor for the city success: we can define this ability to connect and to
keep connected “webness”. This webness is helped by new technologies such as ICT,
aimed to provide and to share information, communication, and “intelligence”,
understood as a systemic planning ability.
At the European level, a research and development joint programme on Smart Cities has
been launched in 2011 [EERA Smart Grids]. The European Energy Research Alliance
(EERA) Joint Programme on Smart Cities investigates the highly complex structure of a
future smart energy system on an urban level by applying innovative solutions in an
interdisciplinary manner based on a clear long-term research strategy.
The EERA JP on Smart Cities, is investigating the following areas: 1. Energy in Cities; 2.
Energy Networks; 3. Buildings; 4. Supply Technologies.
As additional investigation areas, the various aspects related to transport and mobility
play a relevant role. In addition, new business models and innovative investment
schemes will be necessary in the future for actually enabling the transformation of
European cities into Smart Cities from a financial point of view.
“Smartness” and concepts for our cities of tomorrow
The holistic approach named as Smart City has been stimulating the development of
new guide concepts for the city development, which overlap to the existing ones (e. g.
energy efficiency and sustainable development). These new concepts aim to enhance
the social participation in the city development. The basic concept is the “smart
community” that participate in the city development process through a wide use of ICT
technologies and connectivity.
The novelty of the smart city approach relies in seeing from a unique perspective several
aspects related to the city functioning, which were saw as separated until the recent past.
The result of this approach is the idea of the city as a complex system of interconnected
networks (transport, energy, buildings, lighting. social relationships, water and waste,
etc.). By integrating all these different networks into a co-ordinated design it is possible
to provide the citizen with new services, while opening a possibility to the progressive
transformation of the city.
Three different levels can be used for describing a possible smart city scheme.
The first level is the “City Government”: the whole government and decision system of
the city. This includes many topics: security, risks monitoring (food and environment),
services for the citizens (e-Government), urban planning as well as transport planning
