Mitigating Global Warming and Reducing the Over-Reliance on Critical Minerals Using Smart Cities: A critical review and analysis of the smart-city concept from theory to practice
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Common decarbonization strategies to mitigate global warming heavily rely on material-intensive technologies. Such reliance could lead to physical scarcities and monopolization of critical minerals and the ethical dilemma of depending on countries known for violations of human rights and neglect for environmental standards in association with the mining of essential resources. Cities are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions due to their high energy demand and are highly vulnerable to climate instability; thus, they are primary sites for deploying decarbonization measures. Smart cities have an opportunity to simultaneously mitigate global warming and alleviate the emerging critical minerals crisis. However, extant smart-city definitions, frameworks, and initiatives barely acknowledge these two critical and interconnected challenges. Hence, this thesis proposes a definition that includes consideration for critical minerals by requiring a smart city to have (1) structures designed for low energy consumption and high shares of renewable energy, (2) advanced AI-assisted optimization techniques, and (3) optimized execution of operations and delivery of services, while controlling costs and maintaining resource efficiency, particularly of critical minerals. These three elements raise two research questions addressed in this thesis: (1) Do smart-city definitions and frameworks incorporate the highlighted elements in the proposed definition? (2) Are there deployed smart-city initiatives that align with the proposed definition?A search identified 80 definitions and 33 frameworks up to 2021. Among these, all except for two frameworks lack the three proposed elements, while the goals of utilizing computer technology (almost as a be-all-and-end-all) and (to some extent) increasing economic growth are recurring themes among the definitions. As for the initiatives, select projects from three case study cities were implemented in select areas of the cities’ building, energy, and transportation sectors instead of being citywide and systemic. Only one project (a building) aligns with all three proposed elements, but, on its own, is insufficient to designate its host city as “smart”. The analyses of the definitions, frameworks, and initiatives also reveal that the proposed definition also acts as a preliminary assessment tool for existing smart cities and as a preliminary roadmap for the planning of smart cities.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Jimenea, Catherine Labanza
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204017546