Smart City Planning and Environmental Aspects? Lessons from six cities

In this paper, we explore some promising Smart Sustainable City initiatives and solutions in Amsterdam, Barcelona, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai and Vienna, with a focus on environmental aspects. These initiatives and solutions include implementations of smart sustainable city technologies, and municipal support for such implementations. We analyse these initiatives and solutions with respect to their potential for replacing or intensifying products/spaces/travels/transports, leaning processes and activities, or informing city inhabitants or visitors of better choices from an environmental perspective, as well as their connection with a number of smart city challenges. We also discuss some of the problems we have found in these initiatives and solutions, especially regarding risks of rebound effects. Finally, we formulate three lessons for smart sustainable city implementation.