Smart, Resilient and Transition Cities: Commonalities, Peculiarities and Hints for Future Approaches

This chapter discusses the commonalities and peculiarities of the three urban metaphors presented in the first three chapters of this book: smart city, resilient city, and transition towns, exploring meanwhile the potential for strengthening their synergies to promote integrated approaches to climate issues. In the last decade, these metaphors have gathered increased attention from planners and decision-makers since all of them. However, from different perspectives, aimed at empowering cities in the face of the more and more interconnected challenges currently threatening them, as well as the growing uncertainties arising from the ways that natural and human systems will develop and interact in the near future. After a brief overview of the three metaphors, this chapter examines their commonalities and peculiarities to better understand their respective roles in supporting climate strategies and their potential synergies and conflicting aspects.