The UN's 2030 agenda's intelligent cities indicators and the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The growth and development of cities, from the earliest times, accompanies the degradation of their natural environment, devastates forests, pollutes rivers and seas, extinguishes fauna, among others. However, since the middle of the last century, humanity has awakened to the importance of preserving and restoring the environment in order to provide a better quality of life and well-being for future generations. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) elaborated the 2030 Agenda with seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of the pillars of which is environmental sustainability as a goal of responsible and intelligent development. In this same path of ideological innovation, researchers develop the concept of smart cities - those that use their resources intelligently, and promote, through the evaluation of several indicators, the classification of the degree of intelligence of cities. The research question is: are these models of representation and evaluation of smart cities aligned with the seventeen SDGs of the UN 2030 Agenda? This study sought to identify the connection and adherence of the indicators for classifying smart cities from the PoliTIC methodology, in the environment dimension, with the objectives of the 2030 Agenda related to the theme through a pairwise comparison of these indicators as suggested by the AHP method. The result demonstrates that although some indicators are more adherent to the objectives studied than others, the variation found was small and shows that the indicators of this methodology are connected in an equivalent way with the SDGs.