Achieving the intelligent city

Conventional approaches to sustainability pit environmental
protection against economic development. 

But a holistic approach to the question will find that the 
greatest hurdles  to achieving sustainability lie neither in 
the environmental or economic spheres, but in the social. 
Global environmental problems have their origin in local
action, and changes to the global environment have 
significant local impacts. 
Cities are open social systems integrated into the broader 
systems of theglobal economy and global environment. 
They are increasingly indistinct from their hinterlands and are 
globally connected to one another in a progressively more 
complex web of links: in production systems, finance, resource
 usage, and through the environmental problems caused, and 
suffered, by them.