The Smart Environment Scenarios of Mashhad Metropolis, Iran

A Smart city ensures sustainable economic development and life quality improvement using human and social capitals and communication infrastructures, manages its natural resources consciously, and includes the dimensions of Smart economy, mobility, environment, people, life and government. This study aims to understand the Smart environment component, using future studies approach in order to investigate and structurally analyze the interactions between the environmental drivers in the Mashhad metropolis and present future scenarios.

This is a quantitative survey carried out in 2022 in the Mashhad metropolis. In order to identify the drivers. The opinions of 30 urban management experts and specialists were collected using targeted non-random sampling and were analyzed in the Mic Mac software. For compiling the scenarios facing the Mashhad metropolis in the Smart environment, the questionnaire was given to 20 foresight experts to collect their opinions to score the matrix of the conditions facing the descriptors.

According to the results of Mic Mac software, three indicators, including environmental regulations, raising citizens' awareness and encouraging them to participate, and the environmental supervision and monitoring were the most influential and impressible variables. Variables' places in the "matrix of direct influence" shows that system is unstable.

Just two scenarios (Golden and disaster scenarios) out of 115 possible ones had high compatibility in Mashhad. "Environmental regulations" and "environmental supervision and monitoring" were the most influential factors playing an important role in making Mashhad environment smarter. These two factors are of great importance in making the first scenario more probable and to avoid the second scenario.