Smart sustainable cities evaluation and sense of community

JanainaMacke, João Alberto Rubim Sarate e Suanede Atayde Moschen

This paper pursued to evaluate the residents' evaluation on the smart sustainable city and the sense of community. The study analyzed interviews with 392 citizens from five neighboring cities from a micro-region in southern Brazil. Factorial analysis and linear regression were applied. The investigation recognized three factors for smart sustainable cities evaluation: public services and facilities; material well-being, and environmental well-being. Linear regression reveals that residents' satisfaction with the city is predicated on the material well-being, public services and facilities, environmental well-being, and sense of community, which explain 40.2% of satisfaction with the city. Considering a smart sustainable city viewpoint, the study accomplishes that: (i) policies should be projected from the neighborhood standpoint, due to the facility of understanding shared values (ii) sense of community should be included in policies for smart sustainable city; (iii) the design of neighborhoods and cities should prioritize social interactions, with the view to build social capital and facilitate policies implementation. By integrating the smartness to sustainability approaches in the city context, this study intends to contribute to a major discussion on sustainable development, with special attention to residents' evaluation. Finally, the paper offers pertinent outcomes for urban planners and social researchers, by finding factors that influence the sense of community and residents’ evaluation on their city and by offering elements for academic, political and debates.