# IoT-Enabled Smart Sustainable Cities: Challenges and Approaches
## 3 Improving the Sustainability of a Smart City  
### An Illustrative Smart City: Parma  
Besides the guidelines on indicators sets provided at European level, each country performs its own analyses and reports to measure and estimate the level of smartness and sustainability of different national cities. Therefore, an ever-increasing number of municipalities are selecting their own indicator sets, aiming at finding the key aspects in their evolution towards sustainable smart cities. An example of a medium-sized city is Parma, Italy, that, from 2017, ranks in the top 10 Italian cities according to the iCityRank ranking [23]. The iCityRank national ranking aims at giving a measure of the progresses of different Italian municipalities towards the objective of being a smart city. In order to quantify this progress, proper performance metrics include dynamism, functionality, attention to ecological problems, sustainability, attention for citizen, and others. This progress is obviously supported by the possibilities opened by technological advances technological advances. Ranking is based on several indicators, which change and are re-evaluated every year, that are related to different aspects of the quality of urban life. In 2019, the indicators selected by iCityRank were the following, as shown in Figure 5.  
* economic solidity;
* sustainable mobility;
* environmental protection;
* social quality;
* governance;
* digital transformation. Figure 5: Smart city indicators selected by iCityRank in 2019. For each one of these indicators, the annual report presents a separate ranking, which is evaluated considering a set of more than 100 sub-indicators, in turn measuring more than 250 sub-indicators coming from qualified sources or specific surveys. In Table 2, the ranking obtained in the period 2017 \(\div\) 2019 by the city of Parma is shown: the data trend clarifies how the municipality of Parma is working on different aspects with the clear intent of improving the services offered to its citizens by implementing the concept of smart sustainable city. In order to improve the rankings shown in Table 2, within the Ruggedised project [6] the city of Parma has created a local Smart City Governance Plan, acting as a promoter within the city and the stakeholders, with the goal of developing a vision, a roadmap, an investment plan, and an action plan. In November 2017, the initiative _Parma Futuro Smart_[24] was officially launched to co-design and co-manage the smart city process. In detail, Parma Futuro Smart is a political strategy tool that supports the city's decisions for the definition of a smart city's Action and Investment Plan by 2030. With its specific connection and promotion role, more than 50 local, regional, and national stakeholders have been involved in this initiative (such as public authorities, research institutes, private enterprises and representatives of associations, non-governmental organizations, and citizens). The concept of smart city promoted by Parma Futuro Smart does not mean merely innovation, resilience, and technology, but also dialogue, social inclusion, sustainability, creativity, and identity. Therefore, the ultimate goal is to create a \"humanized\" and structured city based on a strong local network composed of people, places, and policies. From an organizational point of view, the local stakeholders involved in the foresight process have been divided into the following four thematic working groups, with each of them being linked to one or more specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):  
* Smart transport and mobility;
* Smart energy, environment and smart grid, infrastructure;
* Smart society and people;
* Smart economy and innovation.