Smart cities: New urbanism and new agrarianism as a path to sustainability

Abstract

A smart city is a city that prepares for the future. It can be defined as a city that adopts the principles of New Urbanism and New Agrarianism in its design and organization. The charter and canons of New Urbanism are presented and described, as is the working tool of the transect. An important aspect of New Urbanism and the smart city is walkability, with accompanying population density and mixed use. Food is fundamental to all forms of human life and is a principal organizing principle of the smart city. Key to the success of the smart city is Urban Agrarianism: the production, processing, preparation, and distribution of food within the city, including the use of the periphery for meat and dairy, while focusing fruit and vegetables within more densely populated inner transect sectors. The smart city is the food secure and relatively diverse city that follows nature as guide, organizing itself by ecological principles which support diversity and variety and which encourage interaction of the population with one another and with their surroundings. While successfully combining new forms of urbanism and new forms of agrarianism, the smart city builds on older time-tested forms of urban and rural life. The smart city is a necessary answer to the twin challenges of energy dependency and climate change in a carbon-constrained world. Such a city ever seeks to redefine the edge of possible.