# IoT-Enabled Smart Sustainable Cities: Challenges and Approaches
## 3 Improving the Sustainability of a Smart City
### An Illustrative Smart City: Parma
* Reduction of land sealing, transforming of 4.3 million m\({}^{2}\) wide land initially classified to be used for building purposes into agricultural land and enhancing the agriculture and the environment through the transformation of up to 435 hectares of potentially building areas into agriculture land or natural parks, finally creating the _Periurban Agricultural Park_. * Hydraulic and geological land safety, assuring the security of the territory and citizens through the _Hydraulic Risk Management Plan_ and _Seismic Micro-zoning Plan_. * Widespread service network, with several socialization places dedicated to culture and sports, to promote the quality of relationships between citizens, civic awareness, social inclusion, and perceived safety, particularly in suburbs. * Facilitating the birth of centers of excellence, by multiplying the opportunities and maintaining high local production competitiveness and the strategic assets of Parma, such as trade fair, university, manufacturing, tourism, and agro-industry, also through city facilities well connected with transport infrastructure. Besides this co-creation work, Parma has also started a wide program of technological innovation of the municipal services, and implemented several innovative ICT projects, examples of which are listed as follows. * Centralized control of traffic lights: The municipality sets up a light intersection management system in order to maintain a good coordination of the traffic lights in the urban area (algorithmic optimization) and regulate the duration of green lights depending on the intensity of the traffic. * _3D RTE Parma Information Management_: The Civil Protection department of the municipality of Parma has developed a geo-cartographic software for planning, managing emergencies, and for supporting decisions during critical phases. This software is linked to the Geographic Information System (GIS) of the municipality and uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) and a digital modeling. It contains different kinds of data, ranging from existing infrastructures to old people served by the municipal social services. The geo-cartographic core is the basis on which a whole series of services and functionalities can be implemented. The purpose is to share all the information already held by the municipality, that now stand in different departments. Moreover, this will ensure the full operation in terms of better knowledge, integration, and protection: this will improve the management and planning of the city and its resilience during critical events. * Smart public lighting: Due to a refurbishment plan of the public lighting network of the city of Parma approved in December 2017, the urban lighting redevelopment plan involves a radical modernization of the city network, replacing the old systems with new LED-based ones. This allows a smart management and the installation of new surveillance and traffic control cameras and new sensors. Among a total of 36,613 lighting points, approximately 24,000 new LED lighting systems have been installed, with a linear network extension of 35 km. The project will end in 2035, with a total investment of 29 ME (the contract has been already signed by the municipality). * Traceability of bike sharing flows: The municipality runs a pilot project putting smart locks on 40 items of the bike sharing fleet, in order to monitor bike flows. In the future, a dedicated app will be developed for for the bike sharing system. At the moment, the city of Parma has 26 bike sharing stations and this service is widely used, in particular by commuters, students, or tourists. The main goal of this activity is to have an overview on how the bike sharing service is used and to evaluate if it is better to put some new bike sharing stations or it is more convenient a mixed system, with fixed stations and free floating.