Page 205 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

There are also associations of companies that cluster companies from different sectors. This is the
case of the Smart Cities Council, which defines itself as an advisor and market accelerator that
promotes the move to smart, sustainable cities with the objective of contributing to its partners'
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business success.
4.9 Academia, research organizations and specialized bodies

The academia is a crucial piece on the SSC landscape, and has many roles to play. It has to educate
a new wave of city professionals: urban planners, technologists and economists that are prepared
to deal with the challenges of the new urban landscape. This has already started to occur; as
different universities around the world are launching specific post‐graduate programs aimed at
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creating professionals specialized in this field. The University of Girona (Spain) has been a pioneer
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in this regard, followed by others such as the University of Madrid and the University of London ,
who are launching their own programs.
Research organizations also have a role to play by participating in the on‐going conversation on how
to better drive cities to the smart and sustainable model, and it must have a voice on the
standardization processes.

Building on documented experienced and conceptualizations, the academia and research
organizations can even make a science of cities. For example, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute
are already doing so through a research initiative titled Cities, Scaling and Sustainability, aimed at
developing theoretical insights about that can inform quantitative analyses of the cities' long‐term
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sustainability. There are also universities that have created labs specially focused on this subject,
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like the Senseable Cities Lab from MIT and the Smart city Lab from the University of Bologna.
Universities, associated labs and research parks, can be very helpful in the development of SSC
models by driving research and creating innovation. Research in other fields, not specifically focused
in cities, such as mathematics, data mining, analytics, economics, and computer vision, among
others, can help develop useful solutions and tools for SSC.

Specialized bodies such as consulting firms, with expertise on SSC projects are able to assess and
propose new ideas for SSC. They are also able to assess the initial situation before a project takes
place and define the baseline upon which the improvements can be measured. This is essential on
any urban and SSC project, to be able to prove and quantify the improvements achieved. With their
expertise in measuring methods and framework definition, these bodies can assist city managers
and policy makers on the transition to this SSC new model.

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41 Smart Cities Council http://smartcitiescouncil.com/category‐vision
42 Master in Smart Cities. University of Girona. http://www.udg.edu/tabid/8439/Default.aspx?
ID=3105M0413&language=en‐US&IDE=5
43 Master in Citi Sciences. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. http://www.citysciences.com/

44 Smart Cities courses at CASA. University College London. http://mscsmartcities.org/
45 http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities‐scaling‐and‐sustainability/
46 Senseable Cities Lab. Massachussets Institute of Technology (USA). http://senseable.mit.edu/
47 Smart city Lab. University of Bologna (Italy). http://smartcity.csr.unibo.it/

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