Driving discussion at this ASL session on smart cities was the recognition that, in the midst of the polycentric globalization process unfolding, cities are becoming hubs of increasingly smarter networks capable of galvanizing and generating new momentum for innovation and growth. Any satellite photo will suffice to reveal a web of interconnected urban expanses, serving as crossroads and convergence points for tangible and intangible infrastructure. The beating heart of this network – which transcends geographic borders drawn in the nineteenth century and vitiates the governmental demarcations of the last century – are smart cities, the linchpin of a new urban development process.
The participants were at pains to stress, however, that innovation and change in the urban structure alone do not make a city “smart”. For urban centers to become “smart”, they must first and foremost serve the needs of those who live in and enliven them. The challenge for a smart city is therefore to offer variegated yet consistent and well-coordinated responses to the needs of citizens, city users and businesses alike. The success of the transformation process underway was seen as resting on three pillars: technology, public education, and governance. Technology, while being the bearer of great change, was deemed to present more of a solution to the various problems associated with cities than a hindrance to urban development. Governance, however, was considered a more complex issue: long-term vision is needed to transform a city, as are clear guidelines that remain stable over time – two elements which are not always easy to reconcile with the time pressures and needs of a political system such as that operating in Italy.
It was accordingly felt that such a complex transformation process cannot be accomplished without a focus on training and educating the public. Indeed, as smart cities cannot exist without smart citizens, the key lies in smart schooling that aligns education with the long-term transformations that cities must undergo. Even so, as nodes in tangible and intangible networks, smart cities also require mobility infrastructure and services, with a view to facilitating the necessary urban inflow and outflow of goods, information and people. It was acknowledged that the mobility of citizens and city users is a problem that governments have been tackling for some time, with the aim of improving commuting times between home, school and the workplace. Mobility was recognized as one province where technology can be of invaluable assistance: the creation of smart work centers and the relocation of new “light” industry to the suburbs, for instance, allows commuter flows to be reduced and breathes new life into otherwise exclusively residential areas.
The transportation of goods, on the other hand, must contend with an aspect in which Italy still lags behind the rest of Europe, namely: logistics. It was observed that as an integral part of the creation of smart cities, investment also needs to be channeled towards global transport hubs such as ports and airports – facilities which thrive and are found within urban areas, and for this reason were called on to experiment in smart interactions with their surrounding communities, so as to obviate chronic problems of traffic and congestion.
As adequate and efficiently-managed infrastructure remains a key ingredient for global competitiveness, the participants emphasized the need to avoid spreading scarce resources thinly across too many works and the importance of proceeding in accordance with an integrated system approach. This constitutes yet another reason for bearing in mind that cities and their infrastructure networks provide the framework around which a variety of services are developed. Hence, ensuring quality, efficiency and modernity is essential in order to meet the needs of citizens and businesses. After all, the services that a smart city can offer are not solely confined to the basic ones traditionally delivered by municipally-owned companies, such as transport services and utilities. Equipped with an increasing number of smart sensors, smart cities are also generating a growing mass of data useful for a wide range of applications. This data thus needs to be handled appropriately, with careful reflection on what should be made freely available – as per the “open-data” paradigm that is already being tried out in several cities around the world – and what information on citizens should be subject to privacy protection.
By way of conclusion, the seminar attendees suggested that, in this as in other areas, what would seem to be called for is debate culminating in a shared long-term development strategy – the only way of eliminating inefficiencies that characterize cities and contributing to the growth of the urban socio-economic system. With urban centers becoming the very linchpins of the globalization process, making them smarter and more sustainable continues to be one of the main mechanisms to hand for stimulating growth and development in the years to come.