Smart cities and urban areas—Aquaponics as innovative urban agriculture

Aquaponics is an innovative smart and sustainable production system for integrating aquaculture with hydroponic vegetable crops, that can play a crucial role in the future of environmental and socio-economic sustainability in smart cities. These cities aim mobilize all knowledge centers and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into innovation hubs in order to strengthen the socio-economic progress. Nowadays the production, transport and logistics of food requires high costs and transport and harvest from other parts of the planet to the cities, associated to intensive polluting technologies. Aquaponics can play a key role enabling local production, fresh, free of pesticides and healthy with short supply chains in the cities. Despite the technical developments in aquaponics there is still no integrated approach to analyze their potential as urban agriculture. This paper aims to contextualize the aquaponics as urban farming and analyze the necessary developments in that field, namely, the need of an integrated approach from producers to consumers on smart cities. So, this paper analyzes the importance of Theory of Planned Behavior on aquaponics stakeholder's decision making process and the efficiency analysis in aquaponics systems by parametric (Data Envelopment Analysis), and non-parametric methods (stochastic frontier production) as an integrated and innovative approach.