Explanation of smart environment scenarios in Mashhad metropolis

Aims: The term "smart" is a common term in urban policies that emerged after the 2000s. A smart city is a city that, through human and social investments and communication infrastructures, will ensure sustainable economic development and improve the quality of life, and its natural resources management will be conscious, and it will have the dimensions of economy, mobility, environment, people, life and smart government. The metropolis of Mashhad as the second metropolis of the country in recent years has taken steps in the direction of smartness, therefore, in this research with a practical purpose while identifying the component of the smart environment, using a future research approach to investigate and structurally analyze the mutual influence of environmental drivers. Smart in Mashhad metropolis and presenting future scenarios has been discussed. Methodology: In order to identify the drivers, the opinions of 30 urban management experts and specialists were taken using targeted non-random sampling and analyzed in the Mic Mac software. And for the stage of compiling the scenarios facing the Mashhad metropolis in the smart environment, the opinions of 20 experts in foresight were used to score the matrix of the states facing the descriptors. Findings: The results of the analyzes in the Mic Mac software showed that the three indicators of the development of environmental laws, promotion of awareness and participation of citizens, and environmental supervision and monitoring are effective and influential variables, and the way the variables are placed in the direct effect matrix shows the system is unstable. Conclusion: The results show that the metropolis of Mashhad faces two scenarios in the dimension of smart environment, the golden scenario where all the descriptors are in a favorable situation and the disaster scenario where the descriptors are in an unfavorable situation. These two scenarios are among 115 possible scenarios, with strong compatibility were identified.