#ISSS2017 Vienna

The development of smart cities is considered an alternative to face urban problems; one of them is the growth of population with disabilities and senior citizens, which will lead to sustainability issues particularly those dealing with services and infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need for innovation in the tourism sector, considering the Triple Helix model to achieve competitiveness in urban tourism destinations.
This research presents a literature review of the smart cities characteristics, challenges, and opportunities that bring technological development in social inclusion. The Soft Systems Methodology is applied to show how the smart tourism destination can be modeled. This review shows that smart cities can make more competitive and inclusive the tourism destinations, considering the cultural, economic, politic and social context and how the Triple Helix model of innovation is capable of building strategies and public politics that bring social inclusion for people with disabilities and senior citizens, making the city a more competitive destination.

Europe is ageing, due to higher life expectancy and decreasing birth rate. It is estimated that in 2060, 30% of the population in the EU are older than 65 years. Human worry, suffering, and grief caused by old age are a concern for everybody. This needs increased attention because the physical and mental health of a growing number of persons is actually or seemingly affected. Strengthening the resilience of seniors is a necessary but complex interdisciplinary challenge.

Can we do a better job of anticipating, understanding systemically, and mitigating the consequences of ageing? We are challenged to find new ways of integrating scientific, technological, cultural, ethical, political, and economic influences in order to alleviate the physical and mental stress caused by ageing and its consequences.

In analogy to Industry 4.0 the power of Information and Communication technology (ICT) and Systems Thinking provide tools for analysis (e.g. Big Data), simulation, extrapolation, and strategic planning of the trajectory of ageing and assistive technologies.

Nowadays, the senior population, many of them still active and even working, is surrounded by technology, internet and social networking. It is, however, necessary to adapt and align existing technology with the physical and cognitive needs of the lifestyle of seniors, their specialized health care, their idiosyncrasies, and their interests to support their active ageing, their independence and quality of life.

For this workshop we invite researchers in this field to present, discuss and compare their objectives, approaches, and (as far as available) results with respect to both theory and practical experience.

Typical issues are:

reduce physical, cognitive and social frailty amongst seniors, typically overcoming deficiencies of sight, hearing and touching
enhance seniors’ participation in physical activities,
motivate seniors to remain healthy and active,
supporting elders in healthy eating habits.
develop elderly-oriented, body positioning and training computer games
overcoming psychological problems, loneliness and isolation
non-intrusive alarm systems for helpers


Participants are invited (but not required) to send a short (half page) position statement by July 1st 2017 to the chairpersons in order to improve comparison and discussion of various approaches in the workshop.

Note that this workshop is closely related to the session ‘Resilience 4.0: ICT Support for Human Resilience in Crises and Old Age ‘, where full papers are expected.

For further details and information feel free to contact the chairperson.

Looking forward to seeing you in Vienna!

A policy compass indicates the direction and degree of success of a policy in both very general qualitative terms and in robust statistical terms. I propose to modify the compass to reflect the underlying suppositions of ecological economics: that society is dependent on the environment, and that economic activity is dependent on society. We can think of this as three concentric circles, the economy being the smallest.

Any formal institution can develop a policy compass to examine the discrepancy between what the institution would like to do (its mandate) and the actual performance and situation it finds itself in, where the latter is determined through an aggregation of statistical data and facts. These are made robust and stable using meta-requirements of convergence. They can be aligned with some of the fundamental conceptual and normative thinking of ecological economics with this new adaptation of the compass.

In this paper, the general policy compass is explained, followed by an adaptation for ecological economics. The policy compass is original, and so is the adaptation. The compass is inspired by the work of Satish Kumar, Stanislav Schmelev, Anthony Friend, Georgescu-Roegen and Rob Hoffman. In the conclusion, I discuss the accompanying conception of sustainability.