CR_005: Technology Domains and Taxonomies in Sustainable Community Design (Consensus AI Review)

Summary

Consensus AI review of 50 papers on technology taxonomies for sustainable community design. Confirms peer-reviewed taxonomies exist using sector-based domains, but no universal standard. Smart city/village literature consistently organises around 7 domains: energy; water/environment/waste; food/agriculture; housing/buildings; health/care; mobility/transportation; digital/governance. Layered architecture models (infrastructure → intelligence → application → service) are common, with AI/digital intelligence explicitly positioned as a layer, not a peer resource domain.

Key claims

  • Peer-reviewed frameworks exist for decentralised community infrastructure taxonomy, but vary significantly by regional context and purpose. CR_005
  • Consistent 7-domain structure in smart city/village literature: energy; water/environment/waste; food/agriculture; housing/buildings; health/care; mobility/transportation; digital/governance. CR_005
  • Zhao et al. (2022) 4-layer digital village architecture: infrastructure system (physical/digital) → village brain (data integration/intelligence) → application support (platforms/services) → application service (sectoral solutions). AI/intelligence is explicitly layer 2, not a resource domain. CR_005
  • Kazlauskienė & Atkočiūnienė (2025): 15 ICT application domains including agriculture, healthcare, energy, transport — with IoT, AI, blockchain as cross-cutting technology categories within each domain. CR_005
  • FEW Nexus (Food-Energy-Water) frameworks treat these three as integrated but analytically distinct domains — not bundled. CR_005
  • Housing/shelter has the lowest empirical validation in existing taxonomies; food/agriculture has the largest research gap in digital-centric frameworks. CR_005
  • No universal taxonomy: diversity in terminology and domain boundaries is the norm, not the exception. CR_005

Implication for EDT framework

Corroborates CR_004: 7-domain sectoral base is well-supported (energy, water, food, buildings, health, mobility, governance/economy). Digital/AI/IoT consistently appears as a cross-cutting layer or “village brain,” not a peer domain. Supports separating Food and Water as distinct domains rather than bundling them. See edt_framework.md.

Research targets

Documents to retrieve

  • [RT_032] Aberilla et al. (2020) — design and environmental sustainability assessment of small-scale off-grid energy systems for remote rural communities (Applied Energy 258:114004, doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.114004). → D01
  • [RT_033] Xu et al. (2024) — Information systems-enabled sustainability transformation: energy self-sufficient village in Germany; community-scale case study (Information Systems Journal 34:1402-1424, doi:10.1111/isj.12489). → NI design, thesis

Connections

Links to

Sources (1): CR_004

Referenced by