Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Urban Smartness: Tools
and Experiences
Domenico Costantino
Abstract
The necessary steps to build a different city that combines both sustainable
development and urban quality include understanding of the events that emerge
in different territories, identifying the appropriate actions, policies and finding
innovative tools and procedures.
4.1
The unsustainable settlement model
The growth of urban territories and the concentration of the population in those
urban areas characterize the current development of the settlements.
Beginning with the second half of the twentieth century, the number of
inhabitants populating urban areas has grown exponentially: in fact, in the second
half of '900 only 30 % of the world population lived in cities, while, nowadays,
about 50 % of the population, accounting for 3.3 billion, are city residents. The
United Nations in ''The State of World Population 2013'' report that this phe-
nomenon will continue to increase in the next decades, and it has been calculated
that, by 2050, 70 % of the world population will live in cities (UN-Habitat 2013 ).
Analysing satellite information gathered for twenty years (1988-2008),
researchers in the American universities have published an article in PLoS
ONE (Seto et al. 2011 ). The data they have analysed in this paper show that
 
 
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