ARTEMIS

The smart city concept has received increased attention from researchers and decision-makers across the EU. However, there is a gap between smart city research & practice, and environmental sustainability: to date, smart city projects have not adequately assessed the environmental impacts of their strategies, which remain largely unknown. Research is needed to provide empirical evidence, advanced tools and metrics that can support the design, implementation and evaluation of smart city strategies to improve urban environmental sustainability.

GOALS:

ARTEMIS will investigate whether and how the smart city can improve the environmental performance of urban systems. The research aims to provide: ​​​​​​​

• information on key aspects of smart city strategies that can effectively reduce environmental impacts;
• a new environmental impact assessment framework to support decision-making in smart city projects;
• better key performance indicators (KPIs) on environmental sustainability and circularity for smart cities

STRATEGY:

ARTEMIS will develop an integrated framework coupling urban metabolism and life-cycle assessment, to estimate how strategies implemented in two EU-funded smart city projects (in Lisbon, Portugal, and Trento, Italy) have affected a wide set of environmental impacts, associated with urban systems. Drawing on the framework and results, KPIs will be provided to evaluate environmental sustainability in smart cities. The framework, recommendations and KPIs will be replicable across EU cities.