From smart sustainable cities to smart buildings: a top to bottom approach

Due to reasons such as climate change, resource depletion, air pollution and excessive waste accumulation, there is a growing interest towards smart sustainable cities (SSCs). Various organizations and initiatives have developed standards and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the evaluation of the smart sustainable cities. However, these approaches are limited to a city scale, and a smaller unit of analysis, that is a building, should also be considered to support these approaches. While various smart building assessment tools have been proposed from various countries, there is no globally accepted standard/formalization. Moreover, buildings may require additional criteria while transitioning into smart sustainable cities. Hence, the objective of this study is to evaluate and tailor the SSC concept into a building scale. This paper follows a top to bottom approach to identify the smart sustainable building requirements, building up on the smart sustainable city KPIs. The adaptation of the KPIs is evaluated regarding relevance (whether the KPIs are related in a building scale), and applicability (whether the data can be collected in a building scale). The results of this study can be used as a reference to identify what the buildings should include to support a smart sustainable city formatio