Smartainability: A Methodology for Assessing the Sustainability of the Smart City.

The Smart City paradigm aims to improve citizens’ quality of life in a scenario where the percentage of people living in urban areas is getting higher and higher. In this paper, a new methodological approach is presented to evaluate to what extent the smart cities’ development pursues sustainable development goals. This methodology is called Smartainability. The Smartainability approach allows to estimate, with qualitative and quantitative indicators, how far smart cities are more sustainable (and smart) in environmental, economical, energetic and social fields,thanks to innovative technologies. Moreover, this estimate can be performed before the technologiesdeployment. The methodology has been tested on the case study of the Expo Milano 2015 site. The implementation on the Expo Milano 2015 site, demonstrates that Smartainability methodology is able to give decision makers useful information on benefits generated by smart solutions deployment. This aspect is due to three relevant issues: benefits are expressed with quantitative indicators; indicators are estimated before technologies or solutions implementation; benefits are connected to technologies or solutions deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]