Abstract
The increasing global population’s impact reflects the expanding number of new cities and swelling populations in existing cities, leading to a dearth of resources and growing discontent. ‘Smart sustainable city’ (SSC) concept arose to enhance technology inclusion in city solutions with an optimistic view of sustainable development. Additionally, missing the concomitant existence of conflicts in an urban context. Sustainable peace has emerged from the shadow of conflict resolution to capture the entire peace ecology of Peace, Security, Sustainability, Equity, and Gender. The research explores how effectively International Standard Organization (ISO) and United 4 SSC (U4SSC-ITU) standards evaluate cities’ sustainability and smartness for advancing sustainable peace. While the study explored effectiveness through three significant perspectives, it utilized mixed methods triangulation with interviews, indicator-parsed statistics, and document review: First, the standard’s applicability on all diverse cities, considering concurrent existence of conflicts and development. Second, the study utilized taxonomy to estimate the sustainability-smartness balance correlated with interviews. Lastly, the study selected common assessed cities and correlated interview responses to explore the standard’s potential to indicate technology solutions and policy decisions. The research infers that sustainable peace and its novelty necessitates highlighting and recommends expanding standards to aggregate indicators to measure complex nature, intensity, and reasons for the conflict that can become a macro-indicator for peacebuilding. Moreover, technology infusion influenced sustainable development depends on political leadership and citizen leadership. Finally, the role of standards to indicate technology solutions for improvement is implicit, especially with ongoing exercises of benchmarking, knowledge sharing, and networking amongst cities.
Presenters
Mandeep TanejaStudent, Masters in International Peace Studies, Soka University of Japan, Tokyo, Japan
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
KEYWORDS
Urbanization, Technology, Smart Sustainable City, Sustainability, Sustainable Peace, UNSDG11, Smartness
