Smart city come nuovo paradigma di intelligenza urbana

The concept of ‘smart city’, at first with reference to a mainly energy and technological value, as well as launched by the European Commission under the Climate-Energy Package 20-20-20, has been changing over time with a broader connotation aimed to understand the satisfaction of the emerging needs of the citizens, such as the efficiency in the exchange of information, safety and security, health, education, mobility and infrastructure, the issues of ‘gender’ with general aims of sustainability and improvement of urban quality. The last frontiers of research and experimentation on the topic project beyond the smart city (Campbell, 2012), starting from the reflection that the key requirement of intelligent integration at urban scale of a whole series of largely existing technologies alone is not enough to build a smart city, assert the centrality of the human dimension, assuming the active role of networks of leadership, including civic networks and civil society groups, such as ‘social capital’ able to select and drive the technological hardware of intelligence, to structure and interpret learning, in order to foster really effective innovation processes if citizen-driven. Cities, which at world level are places of concentration of critical issues in environmental, economic and social terms, should thus become areas of application in which to implement innovation workshops in search of possible solutions and, therefore, strategies, methodologies and operative tools for a sustainable urban development able to promote creativity, innovation, solidarity and social inclusion. The transition from a sectoral approach to transdisciplinary approaches implies new paradigms with changes and impacts on the lives of citizens, who are called upon to play a more active role also in the processes of co-design and co-management in services and urban facilities. The basic question which inspired this article, then, is how the smart city can meet the needs and objectives of a specific territory, giving substance to a concept now widely used which, however, is likely to be reduced to a simple slogan if not translated into possible operative dimensions, through putting in a system technological tools, human resources and financial chapters, according to planned objectives in a participatory ways and innovative forms of governance in which local governments have, however, a oversight and leadership role. The analysis of relevant case studies in several European cities as part of the portfolio of EU projects on the theme “Smart Cities”, proposed here, is essential to identify objectives, methods, tools, right ‘ingredients’ useful to the construction of solutions with a high probability of success because focused on the idea of smart city in which the human dimension is a priority.