Urban and regional authorities across Europe must design climate-resilient interventions under constrained budgets, while coordinating more closely with private investors and insurance companies. Participatory governance, multi-criteria decision analysis and climate-investment planning are rarely combined in a single, transparent workflow. This is mainly because cities lack conceptual frameworks linking these elements across policy, technical design and finance. Here we report how the Horizon Europe BLOSSOM project used a design science research methodology in which an ArchiMate-based enterprise-architecture framework, structured around the analytic hierarchy process, developed the Co-design Framework for Bankable Climate Interventions (CFBCI), proposed as a reference architecture for participatory co-design of climate-resilient interventions. CFBCI is illustrated through a single instantiation in the River Cole urban-reforestation intervention in Birmingham, United Kingdom, one of seven BLOSSOM pilot sites across Europe; this instantiation demonstrates the framework’s structure and is not presented as a validated case. Representational completeness was examined through the Bunge–Wand–Weber ontological model and a co-creation session with BLOSSOM stakeholders. This formative evaluation, rather than a test of bankability or decision effectiveness, revealed three incompleteness gaps, one excess element, two redundancies and two overload issues, alongside general stakeholder interest and three refinements arising from the co-creation session: explicit legislative elements, flexible facilitator/expert roles for resource-constrained municipalities, and a simplified implementation guide. Together, these findings offer a conceptual reference architecture for structuring co-created climate solutions, providing a basis for future empirical validation and comparative research on urban sustainability transitions.
IntroductionIt is based on the premise that food infrastructure reflects socio-spatial inequalities and the asymmetric competence of corporate and associative supply models. This study analyzes the geographic inequalities of the urban food space in the Metropolitan District of Quito, Ecuador, based on the territorial distribution of chain supermarkets, municipal food markets, and agroecological fairs.MethodologyA quantitative geographic analysis was conducted using georeferenced databases from official and institutional sources. Outlets in the selected food supply channels were geocoded and analyzed using a regular hexagonal grid of 1 km, calculating density indicators, availability per population, and the Supermarket Dominance Index to assess the concentration and relative dominance of different supply channels.ResultsAmong the 218 mapped facilities, chain supermarkets represented 78.4%, while municipal markets and agroecological farmers’ markets together accounted for 21.6%, corresponding to a ratio of 3.6 corporate outlets for every associative facility. Supermarkets constituted between 68.0 and 82.3% of the facilities analyzed across the six zonal administrations and were concentrated primarily along Quito’s central-northern axis. Municipal markets were more closely associated with historically consolidated urban sectors, whereas agroecological farmers’ markets formed a smaller and more dispersed network. Supermarket density increased markedly across land-value quintiles, reaching a level approximately 28 times higher in the highest-value quintile than in the lowest (ρ = 0.482; p < 0.001).ConclusionThe selected food supply infrastructure is unevenly distributed across Quito, with chain supermarkets showing a clear numerical and spatial predominance, particularly in central and higher-value areas. Although these findings do not represent the entire food system or measure individual accessibility, they provide a geospatial baseline for integrating food supply into urban planning and assessing the territorial role of municipal markets and agroecological farmers’ markets.
IntroductionThe use of electric vehicles (EVs) in India has created a greater need for convenient and efficient charging systems. However, there is limited understanding of why EV owners would choose to use smart EV charging. This study examines the factors related to EV owners’ intention to use smart EV charging in India. It combines three approaches: Technology Readiness, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), and the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP).MethodsData were collected from 535 EV owners in India using a structured questionnaire through online and offline data collection methods. The study examined technology readiness, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, price value, and environmental concern in relation to the consumers’ intention to use smart EV charging. The data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM).ResultsThe findings indicate that all six proposed hypotheses were positively and significantly associated with consumers’ intention to use smart EV charging. Technology readiness showed the strongest standardized association with intention to use smart EV charging, followed by performance expectancy and effort expectancy. Price value, environmental concern, and facilitating conditions also showed a positive and significant associations with consumers’ intention.DiscussionThe results suggest that EV owners may be more willing to use smart EV charging when they feel prepared to use new technologies, expect useful benefits, find the technology easy to use, perceive economic value, have environmental concerns, and have suitable supporting facilities. The study combines Technology Readiness, UTAUT2, and NEP to provide a broader understanding of EV owners intention to use smart EV charging in India context. The findings can provide useful information for policymakers, EV manufacturers, and charging infrastructure providers when developing measures to encourage the use of smart EV charging.
IntroductionRapid urbanization and climate change threaten global urban water security, with projections indicating that over 1 billion urban residents will face water short ages. In many Global South cities, water crises are infrastructural as well as institutional challenges rather than merely hydrological ones, yet city-level analyses of these institutional barriers remain scarce. This study addresses this gap by examining the institutional and organizational barriers to effective water management in Bengaluru, India, a city of over 10 million people facing severe water stress despite importing 1,450 million liters of water daily.MethodsUsing an inductive, exploratory qualitative case-study approach, we conducted 12 semi structured interviews with 13 stakeholders, spanning policymakers to engineers, between December 2024 and February 2025, thematically coded using MAXQDA.ResultsOur study identified that Bengaluru’s water crisis stems from four interconnected institutional failures: (1) weak governance, marked by capacity deficits and absent regulatory frameworks; (2) siloed administrative processes fragmenting decision making across departments; (3) inertia embedding inefficient systems; and (4) lock-in contributing to mutually reinforcing feedback loops that are resistant to change. These factors operate simultaneously across strategic, operational, regulatory, and financial dimensions, perpetuating unsustainable water management.DiscussionWe propose water circularity as a framework for institutional reform that addresses these barriers across all four dimensions. By grounding institutional theory in city-level empirical evidence, this study extends the largely comparative literature and offers exploratory, key-informant evidence suggesting that institutional transformation and infrastructural investment are essential for urban water resilience and sustainability. While rich, these findings lack statistical generalizability; future research should pursue comparative analyses across South Asian megacities and track how Bengaluru’s ongoing governance restructuring reshapes these dynamics.
Resource-dependent monotowns face interconnected urban sustainability challenges arising from economic concentration, environmental degradation, technological dependence, infrastructure pressures, demographic change, and institutional vulnerability. Addressing these challenges requires an integrated approach to sustainable urban transformation that combines digital innovation, environmental responsibility, social inclusion, and urban resilience. This conceptual study develops an integrative framework explaining how open innovation can connect digital transformation and ESG-oriented urban governance to strengthen the resilience and sustainability of Kazakhstan's monotowns. Using a qualitative conceptual approach, the study synthesizes academic literature, international policy documents, and Kazakhstan's national strategic documents through thematic analysis to identify seven interrelated themes and inform the proposed framework. The present study is intentionally theory-building and conceptual and does not claim empirical validation of the proposed relationships. Drawing on Regional Resilience Theory, Evolutionary Economic Geography, Open Innovation Theory, the Quadruple Helix Model, and sustainability governance, the framework conceptualizes monotowns as resource-dependent urban-regional systems in which government, industry, universities, and communities jointly shape sustainable transformation. The framework identifies digital infrastructure, smart technologies, data-enabled governance, knowledge exchange, collaborative innovation, institutional adaptability, human-capital development, and ESG-oriented governance as interconnected mechanisms supporting sustainable urban infrastructure, environmental resource management, economic diversification, social inclusion, and resilient urban development. Open innovation is positioned as the bridging mechanism through which digital and sustainability transitions can be coordinated across urban stakeholders. The study contributes to sustainable cities research by integrating innovation ecosystems, digital transformation, ESG-oriented urban governance, and urban-territorial resilience within a place-sensitive framework. The framework also provides policy directions to advance SDG 11 and support inclusive, environmentally responsible, technologically enabled, and resilient transformation of resource-dependent monotowns.
