Towards the development of a smart district: the application of an holistic planning approach

The most important challenge for planners and administrations is to identify optimal strategies for improving city life from a global point of view. Urban Planning models should therefore provide solutions in a coordinated and holistic way and should be flexible and adapted to different contexts and territorial levels. Currently, a global approach to the development of Smart Cities is still missing. In this paper the authors developed a planning methodology based on the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the reciprocal impacts among Smart strategies applied at the district level. The aim is to assess if and to what extent these actions would influence the performance of the district from a global perspective (Economy, Energy, Mobility, Community, Environment)compared to the base case scenario. The methodology has been applied to a sustainable district ideally located in the suburb of Rome and seven Smart scenarios have been modeled and simulated (with Matlab ® - Simulink). Absolute results show the differences among the seven scenarios; the application of the normalized and a-dimensional Smart Performance indicators allowed also to identify the best scenario from a holistic perspective.