Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
According to the system proposed by the researchers of the Technical Uni-
versity of Vienna, the ranking tool proposed to identify the smartness level of
European cities is declined in six specific features: economy, people, governance,
mobility, environment and living.
Seventy test cities have been selected in Europe showing the following features:
• urban population between 100,000 and 500,000 inhabitants;
• basin of users and workers lower than 1,500,000 inhabitants;
• at least one university.
To compare and rank them in terms of smartness, it has been necessary to
standardize the measurement criteria of the 6 features above, obtaining for each of
them, a numerical evaluation to be given to each city.
Among the 70 cities also 4 county seats of Italian cities are present. The best
placement was obtained by the city of Trento, historically on top of life quality in
Italy, at the 45th absolute position, followed closely by Trieste, at the 49th absolute
position, Ancona and Perugia, respectively can be found at the 51st and 52nd
absolute positions.
1.2.1
Efficientcities: Cities and infrastructures for growth in Italy
It is on the field of urban mobility that the local administrations in Italy are
investing more to implement the concept of smart cities in Italy. This is what
emerges from the recent study (Efficientcities Siemens
2012
) ''Efficientcities:
cities and infrastructures for the growth of the country'' carried out by a public
consortium supported by municipalities, Cittalia-Anci research, and Siemens Italia
that analyses 54 main Italian cities with more than 90 thousand inhabitants, whose
performances, in terms of innovation and quality of living, have been analysed
using a set of indicators for different areas (green, water, air, waste, building
heritage and quality of living, energy, health, mobility and logistics).
The study shows that urban mobility is the most financially supported area with
10.7 billions euros, in three years, followed by the sustainability of buildings and
water.
The other investment fields are: public and private building heritage and urban
restoration respectively with 2.4 and 2.1 billions euros of forecasted investments.
The overall value of the three years plans for the 54 cities is around 37.7 billion
euros. This value, if compared with the Italian GNP 2011 (1.579,7 billion euro)
leads to the conclusion that the overall amount of planned investments, if actually
made, would be around 2.39 % of the Italian GNP.
The study classifies the cities considering 6 different performance aspects
(quality of the urban environment, welfare cities, ideal cities, quality of living and
mobility, cities in transformation and energy cities). The objective of the study is
to identify the basic infrastructural requirements for each of the aspects above,
through the definition of homogeneous classes of cities and identifying within each
