Smart and Sustainable Cities

Urban planners, policy makers and managers have an important role in making cities and communities more sustainable and resilient by incentivizing and developing smart solutions. Medellín in Colombia is a good example of how effective governance and cooperation with citizens led to the remake of the city and transformed it to a safer environment with a thriving economy. But how can those initiatives be sustained and governed? How can we deal with the challenges along the way, like effective stakeholders’ engagement, conflicting interests, decision-making under deep uncertainty, interdependent problems, spatial justice, and the transformation towards a digital society? To sum it up: building smart sustainable cities initiatives requires a strong governance capacity and new approaches!

This course will:

provide the principles for incentivising, planning, developing and managing sustainable smart city initiatives

present an overview of the drivers and barriers for SSC development

present sustainability challenges and tools for SSC development

show practical recommendations to strengthen SSC governance capacity

introduce a smart city governance roadmap

explain the conditions for effective stakeholder engagement and ways to organize co-creation pathways

clarify the regulatory and legal framework for SSC including privacy and cybersecurity issues

describe the conditions to implement digital innovation that benefit citizens including data governance

show the importance of close monitoring and assessing SSC projects including data reliability and algorithms

equip you with knowledge and learnings from case studies from various projects that were carried out in Lain America, next to familiarizing you with common challenges that arise in the process. These cases range from urban transportation to participatory budgeting, safety and waste management applications, but always making the connection with the governance and sustainability aspects.

The course will be moderated in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

This MOOC is a spin-off of the EU-funded Cap4City project. This course has been developed, and will be delivered by experts in the field of Smart Sustainable Cities from twelve different universities in Latin America and Europe. You will find more information on the instructors while you navigate the course.

What you'll learn

• Review governance challenges for SSC
• Reflect and debate on how to set priorities for smart sustainable city initiatives planning and management
• Understand how to engage stakeholders and involve citizens in SSC development and apply co-creation pathways with stakeholders
• Observe the conditions and risks related to IT and data governance in SSC
• Define a draft of a governance and regulatory framework for implementing and monitoring SSC initiatives
• Apply a roadmap for governing SSC initiatives in a real case