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

This chapter discusses 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, although from different perspectives, aim at empowering cities in the face of the more and more interconnected challenges currently threatening them as well of 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, with the aim to better understand their respective roles in supporting climate strategies as well their potential synergies and conflicting aspects.