The Electric City as a Solution to Sustainable Urban Development

ABSTRACT

Comprehensive frameworks for sustainable urban development have been advanced by many scholars and global institutions in recent years. These frameworks are broad and overlapping in nature, but each has its own structure and emphasis. We review a cross-section of these frameworks, examining their foundations and general predictions for an urban future. From this review, we cultivate an argument that continued progress toward sustainable urban development hinges on low-carbon electrification. Our position for electric cities is supported by the sustainability literature and by empirical evidence gathered from the world's largest cities, which shows that economy, physical environment, and basic service delivery improve with per capita electricity consumption. We close with an overview of the challenges associated with urban electrification.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable urban development
• low-carbon electrification
• electric city
• solar city
• megacity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Iain Stewart is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Toronto and lead researcher of a Toronto-based interdisciplinary study on the urban metabolism of megacities.

Chris Kennedy is professor and chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Victoria, Canada. He applies principles of industrial ecology to challenges of developing sustainable cities and global infrastructure systems.

Angelo Facchini is an assistant professor at IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca (Italy) and associate scientist at the National Research Council–Institute for Complex Systems Studies. His research interests include sustainable urban development, urban metabolism, and thermodynamics of cities.

Renata Mele is head of Sustainable Development and Innovation Research at Enel Foundation, Rome. She oversees research activities on the environmental and social impacts of large infrastructure and power plants.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Enel Foundation, Rome. AF has been supported by the EU projects OpenMaker [grant no. 687941] and SoBigData [grant no. 654024].