COMMUNICATION IS KEY TO URBAN SUSTAINABILITY – AUBURN SMART CITY APP

In 2015, United Nations came up with 17 Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030 that serves as a blueprint to achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs later in 2016 stated that “Understanding the key trends in urbanization likely to unfold over the coming years is crucial to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including efforts to forge a new framework of urban development.” Therefore, sustainable urbanization is the key to successful development and a better future for all. Urban studies, on the other hand, are more focused on large, global cities like Atlanta, New York, Tokyo, Kolkata, Dhaka, and others. This has caused discrepancies in the scale of urban studies with least research conducted on small- and medium-sized cities, which often experience unprecedented growth, though not equipped to handle it.

This study focuses on Auburn, a medium-size city in the state of Alabama in southeast USA. The city has been growing exponentially with 567.91% net addition from 1982 to 2019. Being a university town, a big section of the population is fluid, meaning students come and settle for few years, and leave after graduating. The city is progressive and strives to provide a healthy life for its citizens, but a lot needs to be done on environmental justice, equity, climate change preparedness and overall resiliency of the city. This city, in its own way, faces the challenges of development while maintaining a sustainable environment. The SDGs created by UN is mostly tailored towards the whole country, but cities are where we see concentration of people and where policies tailored to sustainability is most crucial and applicable yet neglected. Therefore, this project aims to understand the possibility and practicality of implementation of the UN SDGs in a medium sized city like Auburn; assess the level of sustainable measures already existing and what new can be implemented, whether an open access communicating platform like a mobile app would encourage people to be more involved in sustainable measures.