Antonini, Ernesto

Mussinelli, Elena

Firenze University Press: E-Journals

26 TECHNE Special Issue 01 | 2018 
27
TOWARD THE SMART CITY AND BEYOND
According to the advances emerged from at least two decades 
of intense debate within the EU and abroad, even the European 
Parliament recognized that the notion of “Smart City” concerns 
many different issues, pushed by both ICT and non-technical 
drivers, which overall aim is to «seeking to address public issues 
via ICT-based solutions on the basis of a multi-stakeholder, mu-
nicipally-based partnership» (European Parliament, 2014).
Appealing to the wide horizon of “public issues” and the multi-
layered structure of the urban-related processes and actors, the 
definition acknowledges that is still no common understanding 
about the definition of Smart City, as frequently complained by 
many Authors, but it also suggests that this lack doesn’t affect the 
core of the topic nor the approaches that we can adopt to cope 
with it. Due to the variety of urban situations and stakeholder 
needs that we are facing as well as the peculiar patterns charac-
terizing each human settlement, there is no consolidate models 
to be applied to make a context “smart”, but rather it will be only 
by design that the smart features can be effectively integrated 
within the urban dynamics. Since the crucial role of ICT is con-
firmed as the main enabling factor in the path toward Smart 
City, its effective exploitation asks for a more performance-based 
attitude in developing successful applications, instead of a tech-
nology-dependent one, as sometimes it happened instead. The 
huge extend of the available technical innovations and the fast 
improvement of their features need a better and clearer vision on 
the goals to reach and its socially shared relevance.
However, further research and testing needed to make the po-
tential of ICT useful and effective, developing applications that 
both show the benefits of the city smartness and identify con-
straints and feasibility conditions.
Looking at the physical dimension of the built environment - 
that which architects and planners are properly called to deal 
with- this means that we must resume focus on the optimization 
of construction processes and building management schemes, 
trying to shape them to better fit the needs of quality of life and 
urban welfare and to comply with socio-economic and gover-
nance targets, such as environmental sustainability and social 
cohesion. The resources that ICT make more and more available 
provide both a large palette of tools suitable for this purpose, and 
many opportunities for the development of new applications.
This Special Issue of Techne deals with both these targets: several 
papers report applications on real contexts of smart devices and 
tools, especially focusing on the energy performances improv-
ing at urban, district and building scale; many others deepen 
the definition of models and methods of monitoring, assessing, 
modelling and planning of policies and actions; some ones point 
at the measures to support sustainable city development.
This means that effectively exploiting the new opportunities pro-
vided by ICT is one of the most challenging issues for architects, 
urban planners and policy makers, who need to improve their 
skills in this field, working in closer cooperation together with 
both the holders of technological knowledge and the users.
Among others, two topics emerge as meaningful and promising 
targets for the next steps of the research in this field: the special 
needs of the historic heritage to consider in implementing the 
Smart City policies, and the applications that can be performed 
to deal with it; the exploration of the variety of structures and 
scales that the notion of “city” assumes today, including the large 
peri-urban and rur-urban areas with their dramatically ineffec-
tive features and critical environmental issues.
About 67% of the Italian territory is occupied by a dense network 
of small-scale settlements, while medium-size cities extend for 
25% and largest metropolitan systems for 8% only (ISTAT, 2017).
Additionally, Italy has more than 18,000 listed or protected his-
torical centers, scattered all over the country (ANCSA 2017). 
This irreplaceable part of cultural heritage is as precious as it is 
fragile: ICT applications can provide unrivalled opportunities to 
better protect, manage and value it, but a special attention must 
be paid to integrate new features avoiding any alteration of the 
existing structures.  Not all solutions and devices which have 
been developed for dense and large new cities can be merely 
transposed but adapted to fit the specific needs of these contexts. 
Furthermore, low-density sprawled settlements, high share of 
aged population, lack of familiarity with ICTs by companies and 
public administrations requires to adopt fine-tuned and tailored 
approaches allowing the successful exploitation of the Smart 
City features (Franco and Magrini 2017).
The rich panel of theoretical and methodological reviews col-
lected in this special issue, as well as the experimental applica-
tions here documented, allows us to try to recap the operational 
effectiveness of the concept of “Smart City”, in its various forms, 
as a tool distinctly characterised by a design oriented nature, 
aiming at the improvement of the quality of the territories 
through actions enhancing the “efficiency” in settlement and ur-
ban development.
The transfer of the term “smart” from the building to the urban 
and territorial scale represents in fact an implementation of the 
long process of adjective stratification that, in the last decades, 
has been going alongside the attribution of the word “city”: stra-
tegic, sustainable, healthy and secure, green, ecological, low car-
bon, digital, media, smart and, today, resilient, are the attribute 
used to connote a new demand for quality emerging in response 
to the degradation of built environment.
No wonder all these forms have certain common denomina-
tors with regard to the main environmental challenges of urban 
development and land management. The areas of action taken 
into account are in fact mainly the same, referring to mobility 
and transport, energy and climate, waste and pollution, urban 
DOSSIER
Ernesto Antonini, Department of Artchitecture, University of Bologna, Italy
Elena Mussinelli, Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, 
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
ISSN online: 2239-0243 | © 2018 Firenze University Press | http://www.fupress.com/techne
DOI: 10.13128/Techne-23567
ernesto.antonini@unibo.it
elena.mussinelli@polimi.it
27 E. Antonini, E. Mussinelli TECHNE Special Issue 01 | 2018 
renewal and building construction operations. And not just this: 
also the policies implemented to face these challenges undertake 
similar issues and strategies, focusing on: a knowledge based 
economy; enhancing the cultural assets and the social and ter-
ritorial capital by means of the subsidiarity and the participation 
of an active citizenship; promoting the attractiveness of places 
and spaces, both for locals and tourists.
In this light, talk about smartness - whether referring to build-
ings, cities, territories or communities - goes well beyond the 
objective of promoting and implementing a systematic and ex-
tensive use of ICT in the various fields of action of the public 
policies, but it also requires the capacity to adopt a strategic in-
telligence, meaning a connected, intersectoral and multi-scalar 
intelligence.
Many experiments carried out and in progress at national and 
international level reveal the obvious limits of too sectorial in-
terventions aiming at optimising a specific functionality, such as 
building’s energy performance, resilience to the climate change, 
traffic emissions reduction, slow mobility, etc. These actions, 
whose value must be undoubtedly recognized for being pilot 
tests, often risk not only to produce partial results, in some cases 
completely inadequate to meet the required investments, but also 
to generate new imbalances and inefficiencies.
In this sense, the true intelligence of cities and territories lies 
in the ability to implement an integrated governance, focusing 
priorities and coordinating actions in a medium to long-term 
perspective. With a focus mainly aimed at reducing unnecessary 
waste and consumption, and enhancing possible synergies re-
lated to the proper use of resources, primarily by upgrading and 
enhancing existing assets, through systematic interventions for 
re-use and regeneration.
The rapid acceleration of technological innovation in areas such 
as big data, mobile devices, connectivity and wireless data ex-
change, internet of things, promises developments that are diffi-
cult to foresee today, with transfers extended to the most diverse 
application areas, both in terms of “soft” tools for monitoring, 
control and management, and in the “hard” dimension of infra-
structures and services.
Beyond a purely techno-centric vision that reduces smartness to 
a driver for the economic development of those companies that 
in various ways operate in the ITC (Bolici and Mora, 2016), the 
outlook of a more significant and effective impact of this new 
form of intelligence is in a more balanced combination of socio-
cultural, environmental, economic and technological factors. 
Able to harmonize the interventions in the various fields of stra-
tegic action - energy networks, water, atmosphere, waste, mobil-
ity and transport, health, social inclusion, education, culture and 
tourism, ecosystems and landscape.
REFERENCES
ANCSA (2017), Centri storici e futuro del Paese, ANCSA-Cresme, Rome.
European Parliament-Policy Department (2014), “Mapping Smart Cities in 
EU”, A Economic and Scientific Policy, European Parliament, Brussels, BE.
Franco, G. and Magrini, A. (2017), Historical Buildings and Energy, Springer, 
Berlin, DE.
ISTAT (2017), Forme, livelli e dinamiche dell’urbanizzazione in Italia, ISTAT, 
Rome.
Mora, L. and Bolici, R. (2016), Progettare la Smart City. Dalla ricerca teorica 
alla dimensione pratica, Maggioli, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, RN.


Toward the smart city and beyond

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