Smart District and Circular Economy: The Role of ICT Solutions in Promoting Circular Cities

Abstract

Cities will have a decisive role in reducing the consumption of resources and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Various experiences of urban regeneration have exploited Information and Communication Technology (ICT) potentialities to optimize the management of complex systems and to encourage sustainable development models. This paper investigates the role of ICT technologies in favouring emerging design for Circular Economy (CE) in the urban context. The paper starts by defining the theoretical background and subsequently presents the goal and methodology of investigation. Through a scoping review, the authors identify case studies and analyse them within the Ellen MacArthur Foundation classification framework that splits the urban context into three urban systems: buildings, mobility and products. The research focuses on nine case studies where the ICT solutions were able to promote the principles of CE. The results show, on the one hand, how data management appears to be a central issue in the optimization of urban processes and, on the other hand, how the district scale is the most appropriate to test innovative solutions. This paper identifies physical and virtual infrastructures, stakeholders and tools for user engagement as key elements for the pursuit of CE adoption in the urban context.

Assessment of the Readiness of Industrial Enterprises for Automation and Digitalization of Business Processes

“…Khan and Vorley note the importance of ICT technologies in the management and evaluation of processes [44]. Viglioglia et al explored the possibilities ICT potentialities to optimize the management of complex systems and to encourage sustainable development models [45]. The above research also accentuate the importance and prospects of the research theme about assessment of the readiness of industrial enterprises for automation and digitalization of business processes.…”

How to Recover the Supply Chain under COVID-19 Period Through Recovery Its Resilience

“…Supply chain management works with manufacturing, procurement and suppliers to assess vulnerabilities at supply nodes and apply a robust risk mitigation framework as a response. Actions may include accelerating decentralization, deploying inventory closer to customers, or even advancing, and developing crisis response plans and capabilities [30].…”

Smart Circular Cities: Governing the Relationality, Spatiality, and Digitality in the Promotion of Circular Economy in an Urban Region

“…Such technologies are varied, including Internet of Things (IoT), sensing technologies, GPS tracking, augmented reality, sharing platforms, and social media sites, and enable us to control such areas of urban life as mobility, waste, water, energy, food, and consumption. There is also a considerable amount of literature published, especially since 2017 or so, on various technologies at the intersection of the smart and sustainable city concepts that directly or indirectly discuss the smartening up of the circularity of urban metabolism [65,[89][90][91]. This highlights the importance of understanding the complexity of cities, including the ontology of urban flows and other aspects of urban metabolism [34,51,92,93], as well as the special aspects of urban circularity and the formation of a CC [7,28,[94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102].…”

“…While cities are local nodes of flows, they also have the potential to improve the functioning of, and the benefits gained from, these flows through integrating them with the help of advanced digital technologies. This all revolves around the knowledge processes that enable "identification, collection, traceability, monitoring, analysis, evaluation and redefinition of the circularity of the social, economic and environmental processes and operations" [65], which implies that the role of data management is critical to the optimization of urban processes [57,85,90].…”