Smart City and Circular Economy

One of the pillars that support the Smart City of the future is the environment, a fundamental area for it, because a city can never be called intelligent if it grows with its back on its environment and the resources it needs to provide the service to its citizens.

In this area, it is clear that the current concept of city by itself is far from approaching even the minimum concepts of sustainability today, large cities being in fact one of the main environmental and health problems of humanity, as well as gigantic consumers of resources.

Nowadays, cities are a cancer that spreads uncontrollably wherever they settle.

Thus, if one of the essential premises of a Smart City is to meet the needs and expectations of its citizens, it is essential that the city guarantees the availability of resources and a development environment compatible with the best quality of life of its citizens, which means that

• The availability and quality of the resources required by the citizen is guaranteed at all times, which will form part of the inputs or supplies to the city, such as: quality water, clean air, a stable and sufficient energy supply, a supply of quality food, as well as an adequate distribution of the rest of the necessary resources (equipment, machines, materials, clothing, etc.).
• Means are available to reduce and treat the environmental impacts generated by the use of previous resources, which in most cases end up generating emissions, discharges and/or waste, as well as energy losses, which affect the quality of the city, its environment and even its own resources.

To achieve compatibility between the environment and the city, and thus to ensure that a city can be called a “Smart City”, it is clear that it is necessary to resort to the concepts of cycle closure and circular economy, applying them in their entirety to the flows that make up its services.

It is not a matter of transforming the environment to accommodate the city, but rather of adapting the city to integrate into the environment without affecting its capacity for assimilation.

It is a matter of adapting the consumption of resources in the city to the supply capacity of the environment in which it is located, taking into account its temporal evolution.

It is about self-generating the resources needed for the functioning of the city, promoting more sustainable options, such as indoor cultivation or the use of renewable energy and self-generation.

It is about providing services and promoting lifestyle habits compatible with the concept of urban sustainability and integrating citizens and cities into the environment in which they live, adopting models of sustainable mobility, bioclimatic construction, etc.

But above all, and fundamentally, it is a matter of closing open cycles in each case and of ensuring that the outputs generated in the operation of a city (waste, discharges, emissions, noise, light pollution, etc.) do not become environmental impacts but rather consumer resources. It's about reusing flows and converting them into new resources for the city itself or the environment that supports it.

Our urban waste has to be reconverted into new materials or into useful energy for the city, our wastewater is nothing more than water with organic matter (carbon, after all, which can also serve the sustainability of the city), all our discarded flows are, in fact, likely to become new resources for our city. And this should be the main objective of the Smart City, to generate, as far as possible, a circular economy based on the reuse of waste streams, generating high-value products for the city.

It is possible that today this seems like a pipe dream, but this is necessarily the future that our cities must go through if we want to call them Smart Cities and that meet their future objectives of environmental sustainability.