ABSTRACT
The cities around the world in general, and in the Mediterranean area in particular, are facing tremendous challenges at the environmental, social, economic, and institutional levels, due to the urbanization trend, environmental climatic changes and challenges due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, cities need to be sustainable and smart in the future. An economically important and innovative sector in urban areas is food security. Nowadays, most of the literature explores the concept of smart cities from the point of view of information and communications technology, indeed, the connection with the sustainability aspects of the food supply chain and the ways to operationalize that, remains unsolved. This paper tries to overcome this gap in the literature. The main aim is to analyze the contribution of the short supply chain of food in terms of sustainability in smart cities, regarding current urban trends in cities in general and in Mediterranean areas in particular. The methodology was based on a literature review and includes quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results confirm the existence of positive impacts in the short supply chains of food in urban areas in terms of sustainability. Despite the existence of a considerable number of papers about smart cities and ICT-related topics, the benefits from society of short supply chains of food, and the linkage among the topics and subjects, remain unreferred to or with a limited knowledge exchange. The conclusions of this paper will be helpful for public decision makers to implement policies in order to promote the sustainability of Mediterranean cities. © 2021 by the author(s).
ABSTRACT
Sustainable development, sustainable consumption and short supply chains are nowadays acquiring increasing relevance on the literature. On the other hand, from the consumers attitudinal statement, ethical consumption is also requiring more attention from marketing sciences. Besides that, the integration of the last concept on sustainability remains in a complete lack of systematic and integrative conceptualization. This paper tries to promote a potential integration of all the dimensions of sustainable consumption and to understand the potential linkage and interaction among them, in order to promote the Sustainable Development Goal 15 from the United Nations. The methodology follows a systematic literature review and preliminary information comes from a case study of the approved project SDGsConsum. The results confirm that, besides a huge development in sustainable development and sustainable consumption in the literature, the focus on shortly supply chains of production is yet modest. Moreover, the motivations and constraints that drive and restrain, respectively, consumers toward ethical and sustainable consumption presents several incongruences. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.