Sustainability’s Coming Home: Preliminary Design Principles for the Sustainable Smart District

Consumer trends like local consumption, sharing of property, and environmental awareness change our habits and thereby our surroundings. These trends have their origin in our direct environment, in the districts of our city or community, where we live and socialize. Cities and districts are changing to “smart cities” and “smart districts” as a part of the ongoing digitalization. These changes offer the possibility to entrench the idea of sustainability and build a platform-based ecosystem for a sustainable smart district. This research aims to identify guidelines in form of preliminary design principles for sustainable smart districts. To achieve this, we conduct a structured literature review. On this basis, we derive and develop preliminary design principles with the help of semistructured interviews and a non-representative sample of the German population. The resulting nine preliminary design principles describe a first insight into the design of sustainable smart districts