This piece is excerpted from Smart Cities: Integrating Technology, Community, and Nature, a PAS Report published by the American Planning Association. The report is available for download on the APA website.
Smart cities use technology to make the functioning of our communities more efficient and sustainable. However, technology alone cannot provide for all the needs of a city’s residents. Nature—land, water, air, flora, and fauna—is our essential life support system and will be increasingly important in the era of smart cities.
Over the last several decades, our society has increasingly distanced itself from its inherent connection to the natural world. Trends such as urbanization and climate change have reinforced this disconnection and made it harder for people to realize the many benefits provided by nature. Additionally, unsustainable resource extraction and inequitable access to green space for disadvantaged communities have complicated people’s relationship to natural spaces. The increasing human footprint on natural ecosystems highlights the importance of environmental protection, resource conservation, and the equitable integration of nature into cities.
The term biophilia (bio = life, living things; philia = love for) captures the innate human desire to connect with nature. Numerous research studies have demonstrated the importance of contact with nature for human health and wellbeing (Wolf 2018). A biophilic city is one in which people can have daily contact with nature, with the city’s design and fabric actively and equitably encouraging all residents to connect with the outdoors (Hurtado 2020).
A smart city integrates nature, community, and technology. In doing so, it incorporates natural systems into the built environment to provide mutual benefits for people and ecosystems, while using data and digital technologies as tools to optimize the performance of these systems in delivering these benefits.
Planners can use the concept of green infrastructure as an organizing construct to integrate natural systems and processes into the built environment of smart cities. Two definitions of green infrastructure are in common usage: (1) a large-scale, strategically planned network of natural lands and resources (Benedict and McMahon 2006), and (2) stormwater management practices that use or mimic natural processes to capture runoff near where it is generated (U.S. EPA n.d.). This PAS Report proposes a new definition and vision of green infrastructure for the smart city—one in which nature is not separate from the built environment, but forms a three-dimensional “envelope” that surrounds, connects, and infuses buildings, streets, utilities, and the like (Rouse and Bunster-Ossa 2013).
This vision begins with the urban forest, the largest structural component of green infrastructure in cities. The vision includes parks, green spaces, riparian corridors, and other components of a landscape-scale green infrastructure network. It also includes green streets, green roofs, rain gardens, bioswales, stormwater planters, and other forms of green stormwater infrastructure at the district and site scales. The vision extends to ecological landscape design of public and private properties to replace lawns and ornamental shrubs with healthy, functioning plant communities. Finally, it includes working in concert with nature to manage novel plant communities—the mix of species, mostly non-native, that occur spontaneously in neglected urban spaces—to enhance ecosystem services (the benefits provided by ecosystems that make human life possible and worth living) and eliminate invasive species.
The foundation of the vision of a green, smart city is the idea that green infrastructure provides multiple benefits (often referred to as co-benefits) for people and ecosystems. For example, co-benefits provided by the urban forest include ameliorating the urban heat island effect, absorbing stormwater, reducing energy costs, sequestering carbon, providing wildlife habitat, bringing people in contact with nature, and more. Smart city technology can be used as an ecosystem management tool that optimizes the co-benefits provided.
Opportunities to expand smart city applications to leverage the co-benefits provided by green infrastructure fall into two primary categories: (1) the use of digital technology and data to improve management of and optimize the environmental, economic, and social co-benefits provided by green infrastructure; and (2) the use of digital technology and data to engage citizens and stakeholders in green infrastructure planning, implementation, and management.
Smart urban forest management is an emerging approach to integrating nature into smart cities. This approach involves the design, establishment, monitoring, and management of urban trees and vegetation through the use of digital technologies, for the joint purpose of improving the urban environment and engaging all relevant stakeholders in its governance (Nitoslawski et al. 2019). It complements a new paradigm for the integration of nature and technology in cities that has been termed the Internet of Nature. In this paradigm, urban ecosystem components and interrelationship dynamics are described and represented through digital technologies and applications, and information and data obtained from the digital representation of these urban ecosystems can be used to inform management and planning decisions (Gallè, Nitoslawski, and Pilla 2019).