Five Steps To Becoming A Green Smart City

The whole world is striving to go green, and this is not a novelty. Over the last few years, it’s been fantastic to see more and more initiatives to drive this mission, with cities across the globe putting in the effort to become truly sustainable. When it comes to Smart Cities in particular, sustainability has become a must-have element of city planning.

Since 2010, the European Green Capital title has been awarded by the European Commission in order to encourage cities to move towards healthier and more sustainable living. It’s an initiative that helps give visibility to a number of solutions, often spearheaded by smaller cities that buck the trend in this field (previous title holders include the likes of Vitoria-Gasteiz, Nantes, Bristol, Nijmegen or Lahti).

In January, Grenoble became the official Capital for 2022, after adopting a Climate Plan to strengthen its sustainable transition. Indeed, the city’s efforts and actions read like a case study of best practices towards a greener urban future. This shows that city officials are keen to prove their commitment to the cause, as well as enabling one of the core pillars of the Award itself: to provide an incentive for cities to become role models for each other.

One of the urban policies that Grenoble has put into place to mitigate pollution and biodiversity loss includes a 30km speed limit throughout the city, making it France's largest low emission zone. It has also laid out 12 indicators for its green transition, which local stakeholders will be encouraged to commit to in order to cut emissions in half by 2030.

So what lessons can urban planners learn from Grenoble and other European Green Capitals?

1. Adopt a Climate Plan

Adopting a Climate Plan to fit the city’s needs, while also focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a great start. This gives city officials a clear vision and structure of where efforts need to be concentrated, in order to meet targets and deliver a result which creates a positive impact for citizens.

2. Invest in Green Innovations

Encouraging and securing investment in innovations dedicated to creating renewable energy resources and other green solutions for your city go a long way. You can do this through either public or private fundraising, or both, as I did during my 15 years as City Manager for Alba Iulia, in Romania.

3. Improve Urban Mobility

Lower speed limits in cities reduce emissions (as well as noise levels) and provide greater urban safety. Most ideally, you should combine this with a strategy that promotes alternate means of transport, encouraging more people to leave their cars at home more.

Photo by Phuoc Anh Dang on Unsplash

4. Encourage Citizens and Businesses to go Green

There are several ways in which you can do this. When it comes to food, for example, you can take initiatives to support local producers which will see more of your population consuming cleaner, more environmentally friendly food, which also helps to boost the local economy; you can also implement ways to reduce food wastage and, where possible, ensure that your citizens have easy access to disposal facilities for compostable materials (which includes most food) - this should be made as easily accessible as recycling for paper, plastic or glass, but an alarming number of cities across Europe are way behind on this.

You can also create incentivised development plans for local businesses, helping them to become more sustainable - and creating greener work spaces.

5. Use Smart Technology to your advantage

Smart City tech is about way more than just installing smart traffic sensors - especially if the data gathered by these is just going to sit there. Have a proper implementation roadmap for your Smart City strategy, and ensure that, as well as acquiring and adequately maintaining your IoT devices (saving you from costly fixes down the line), you bring on board the right team to help process and analyze your data, and come up with solutions to keep on improving your urban ecosystem based on it, which is what being a Smart CIty is ultimately all about.

And if you’re ever wondering how to best go about this, you can always contact me.

Initiatives such as the European Green Capital Award are a great showcase for what can be done at an urban level to improve our collective footprint and lead the way forward, especially as increasing numbers of the world’s population move towards cities. However, what we can do to truly shine is ensuring that these initiatives aren’t just left for title holders to pursue, but for all cities to follow suit.