What is a smart city? You may have heard that a smart city is the kind of city that develops innovative ideas and the most advanced technology in order to solve various urban problems and to offer better services for its citizens. Every city aims to become a smart city, nowadays. Is it enough, though, to use technology and to promise better services to really improve the real life of citizens?
You define a “smart” approach when you use a strategic method to successfully reach an objective. The objective of a smart city is to adopt politics and instruments to cope the growing complexity of urbanization and to guarantee community development and wellness. The starter point, in fact, is: how can quality life be improved?
In the last years, in Italy, a lot of interesting initiatives were born, and most of them had a high potential in terms of innovation, occupation, environmental sustainability and economic savings. Some of these initiatives were:
- Smart recycling systems, allowing citizens to pay only for their effective consumption, thanks to a technology that calculates the quantity of waste produced
- Applications to recover and to regenerate abandoned buildings
- Co-working spaces and Fablabs.
Generally, one of the key points is to use new technology, like connectivity and communications and services digitalization.
But, as a Corriere investigation says, “technology facilitates relationships between people, but technology alone cannot make the difference”. Because these projects won’t be isolated and uncomprehend, it’s important to take a step backwards.
The project plan for a Smart City has to start from the citizens needs, but it cannot base only on this. Administrations need to engage the community, to make them part of decision making processes, and to transform it into a initiatives promoter.
A participative process is a dialogue finalized to consensual and shared decision making, but if participation is not real and does not determine change, then it has an elastic effect, in terms of civic sense and social responsibility, and also a detachment for public management.
The actual smart city revolution is a participated project, and this requires a collective learning process, not only an informative one. To gather with citizens to give them information about an urban issue is not enough and not effective: this will not create an active community.
Formation for citizens: this is the key to define a long-term and smart strategy, capable to actually bring changes, and to produce effects on their awareness to be an important role in this process.
Only when citizens will have a full civic sense, responsibility and engagement, then an actual action plan aimed to develop innovative, effective and efficient projects will be possible.
A smart city, to be actually smart, must be first a city that listens, that engages and that co-projects a smart future with their citizens.
