The Road to Smart Cities through Sustainability Reporting in Local Public Transport Companies and Local Governments

The high level of urbanization is one of the elements that has led to a rethink of the relationship among cities, the environment, citizens, and urban policies. Specifically, rapid urbanization has created opportunities and problems in different sectors with consequences on the environment and citizens: inadequacy of infrastructures, risk of reduction of natural resources, high level of pollution, issues of waste management, health problems, and social problems. The label “smart city” emerged in this context, as a new approach to urban development that involves three main aspects: technology, management, and policy. Building a smart city requires an investment of time, to consider all the innovative instances emerging from the system of relationships among citizens, environment, and public policies. A smart city should have or aim to have smart governance, smart economy, smart people, smart liveability, and smart environment to reach the goal of sustainability and enhance the well-being of the liveability of the places. The analysis of the literature highlights a strong gap in the early studies because the development of smart cities regards mainly implementations of technologies and does not consider other factors like strategic choices within policy dimensions and the effectiveness of management. A smart city can be realized through a holistic and bottom-up approach with the active participation of stakeholders, through active actions of stakeholder engagement. The local governments should be the key actors in these processes: a smart city requires a signal that is not based only on “hard” elements (such as infrastructure, smart buildings, etc ...), but also on “soft” components, such as governance, accounting, and strategies. Moreover, the transport system is a very important sector that contributes to attracting and supporting the high mobility of citizens and workers, tourism and events, and investors, and to creating a smart city/territory. The core concept that binds the transport system with the idea of a smart city (or territory) is the need for mobility. A local transport company, similarly to a local government, should search for involvement and participation, functioning, and communication, to concretize its strategic goals into positive results. These considerations lead to the introduction of sustainability practices in the local government and local transport system. Through the adoption of green policies, driven by the value creation, sustainability reporting can support the development of the cities and their transport systems. Starting from these premises and the highlighted literature gaps, this paper offers, after a deep literature review on these concepts, a new conceptual perspective on the integration between the concepts of smart cities and sustainability reporting, with a specific focus on the local governments and local public transport companies. This new perspective aims to promote the concept of integration as the possible solution to the problems of urbanization and sustainability. With an integrated approach, local governments and local transport companies can operate as orchestrators of a new scenario where citizens, communities, and other stakeholders can interact in a smart urban ecosystem, where the environment, technologies, and infrastructures meet the users’ needs.