The regulation of urban property use is a fundamental instrument for the development of cities. However, most of the norms that set general guidelines for urban policy predate the transformations that the smart city concept has brought about in the way cities are appropriated and perceived by society, and even today, studies on how these regulations collaborate to make cities smarter and more sustainable. This work contributes to filling this gap by investigating the main guidelines of the Brazilian City Statute that have the greatest potential to contribute to having smarter and more sustainable Brazilian cities. To prioritize the sixteen guidelines of the City Statute, the methodology used consisted of a survey carried out with professionals working in the concerned field. The results show that the sixteen guidelines were evaluated as important for increasing the intelligence of cities, of which five were evaluated as having the most priority, these five were related to the governance of cities. Considering the scarcity of resources in Brazilian cities, these five guidelines contribute so that municipal governments can direct their efforts towards what has the most priority.

Many cities around the world are facing immense pressure due to the expediting growth rates in urban population levels. The notion of 'smart cities' has been proposed as a solution to enhance the sustainability of cities through effective urban management of governance, energy and transportation. The research presented herein examines the applicability of a mathematical framework to enhance the sustainability of decisions involved in zoning, land-use allocation and facility location within smart cities. In particular, a mathematical optimisation framework is proposed, which links through with other platforms in city settings, for optimising the zoning, land-use allocation, location of new buildings and the investment decisions made regarding infrastructure works in smart cities. Multiple objective functions are formulated to optimise social, economic and environmental considerations in the urban space. The impact on underlying traffic of location choices made for the newly introduced buildings is accounted for through optimised assignment of traffic to the underlying network. A case example on urban planning and infrastructure development within a smart city is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method.Energies 2019, 12, 1318 2 of 23 increasingly reflected in the operations of existing cities, resulting in an interrelated platform between large numbers of citizens, transport networks, services and urban assets and facilities [9].Decision-making in planning and operations of smart cities needs to be structured around two main considerations, namely strategic and tactical decisions [10]. Yet, current emphasis in the literature is on the technical interfaces making up the various data-exchange enabling platforms placed within the cities, with little emphasis on the strategic and tactical urban planning aspects of smart cities. Within the area of strategic decision-making in city planning, zoning of the city and the location of its operating facilities, including schools, hospitals and so forth, are both of significant relevance [11]. An appropriate selection of zone clusters and the subsequent selection of locations to place buildings in form the main components that are involved in city design. In cities, the positioning of new buildings leads to the generation of traffic demand in the existing network structure [12]. This causes additional traffic loadings on the existing network, and if not well planned for, can result in major transportation delays to network users. Traffic congestion is thought to result in over $121 billion in losses [13] and can increase the amount of carbon emissions from traffic by more than 53% [14]. Another important strategic consideration is the development of the underlying travel network of the region. Specifically, the development of the transport network will be based on the capacities required to handle the initiated travel on the transport networks, while the operations of the network will in turn be associated with the established capacity of the network, along...

Cities with high urbanization produce impervious areas. Drainage network overload results in recurring flooding. Much of the damage could be prevented through proper urban planning and good drainage practices. While Low Impact Development techniques have been known for several years, it is essential to encourage the association of this type of technology with conventional micro-drainage structures to increase rainfall runoff at the source where it is generated. Thus, the present work aims to analyze the efficiency of the use of the green roof technique in reducing the peak of the flow and the retention capacity when subjected to heavy rains at the building scale, and also explores its effects in tropical climatic zones with measurements during the summer and fall. The method used was experimental analysis of the Green Roof prototype with bromeliad’s at CESA-UFRJ, whose main results are the hydrogram of each rain event and the runoff coefficient for rainfall in the range of 100 mm/h and 150 mm/h.

One of the methods to assess the urban development of a city is to allocate indicators that quantify its efficiency in performing various functions, such as urban mobility, security, sustainability, and economy, among others. The motivation of this work is the fact that the city of Rio de Janeiro, although widely known and admired around the world for its natural beauty, has a wide negative notoriety regarding its urban functionality. There is a critical need for investment in the city’s infrastructure in order to improve the quality of life of its population. The novelty of this work is in proposing an index that quantifies the urban functionality of the city of Rio de Janeiro and that represents urban development. The research focuses on optimizing investments in infrastructure and hence increasing the urban performance offered by the city of Rio de Janeiro. In the proposed methodology for modeling the Urban Development Index (UDI), this work presents the model structure made from a knowledge-based urban development assessment model (KBUD/AM), the determination of the indicators, the selection of the cities, the data collection from primary and secondary sources and the use of statistical techniques for data normalization and scaling. The research aims to quantify, compare and evaluate the level of urban development of Rio de Janeiro, performing benchmarking with other four global cities (Stockholm, Shanghai, Boston, and Cape Town). Cities are ranked for their UDI to make the comparison more straightforward. Based on the results, Rio de Janeiro ranks second to last among the five cities studied, with an UDI of 0.395, only slightly better than Cape Town. The results confirm that the city of Rio de Janeiro has several deficiencies, especially in the education, safety and health sectors, and is very far from most of the other developed cities. The city of Rio de Janeiro should promote investments in research and development. Finally, this work confirms that Rio de Janeiro must tackle security problems as a matter of priority.

World history tells us that construction has always existed to meet the immediate and basic needs of man, and, in this time of rapid growth, did not take into consideration construction techniques and environmental preservation. This paper aims to present investigation and diagnosis at the stage of site construction, exploring the environmental impacts caused by construction site, with exposure of some interventions to minimize this effect, integrating the concepts of sustainable construction. Given the historical background of continued environmental degradation caused by human needs, which resulted in serious risks to society, and knowing that more than 60% of solid wastes generated in urban centers are from the construction site, the need arises to develop techniques and solutions to mitigate these impacts. Structure of the research/approaches: The paper is structured in four parts: description of an evolutionary history regarding environmental concern, a sustainable construction issue approach, surveying interference at the stage of site construction, and a case study focusing on environmental sustainability during the site construction phase of an enterprise. Contributions: The characteristics of a sustainable building interfere directly in the relation between man/environment with issues that can be minimized when designing a project, which should be applied from the construction of a building to the end of its life cycle. A sustainable enterprise is not defi ned not only by environmental and social benefi ts in its use and operation but also in its construction.