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 Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Smart city and horizon – beyond every hypocrisy from 2015 by Paola Scala, published in the Festival Architettura Magazine. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see real opportunities represented by smart city as the theme of architectural research more aware of its role and more accepting its contemporary challenges. This article advocates for research that is not seduced by fashion slogans and does not escape into universal certainties and abstract utopias.

According to the European guidelines of Horizon 2020, the topic of smart cities and communities and social innovation represents a strategic priority. In Italy, smart city is characterised by principal aspects: the economic aspect supporting the presence of innovative research capable of attracting economic and professional assets, the human and social aspects as cities are only smart if the citizens are smart, and governmental aspect to promote dynamic participation of all stakeholders in modifying the material and immaterial structure of the city. Having overcome the misunderstanding that technology is the aim and the tool of the process of urban transformation into smart city, today architects should reflect on their role in this process.

Nobody believes that architecture is a collection of specialisms but in developing a research project each discipline has to declare its own point of view to better work with the others. Current architectural research arises from misunderstandings about the effects of urban built-up areas on the health environment and from specious interpretations of concepts such as green, smart and eco. Starting with these misunderstandings and false interpretations, architects create fashion slogans and images that do not represent the solution to the serious problems of our age because it is not possible to automatically deduce a new urban morphology or an architectural form of the city from these problems.

Iconic architecture made up of spectacular images was characteristic of the recent past. Some consider this era over, some state it is in transformation. Sometimes the great contemporary problems – the environmental and economic crises – and the possible answers to them developed by other disciplines, such as smart and digital technologies, become media to create new icons and slogans built in an a-critical way everywhere. Architects must be vigilant to use international problems as a mask that hides the inability to work efficiently. On the other hand, architects could again reflect on the physical forms of buildings and urban spaces to fix the meaning and identity of places by means of the form of plan and façade and the balance of mass.

However, today, if architectural research intends finding its won meaning in respects of the physical and immaterial reality, it has to face not only its present contradictions but also its previous mistakes. It is possible to affirm hat in the last few years architecture has worked in an aesthetic field which was completely indifferent to its ethical and social responsibility. Today is also the time to better reflect on the reasons at which the present situation is based. Going beyond the attention-seeking architect and the fascination exercised by the new digital tools capable of generating unusual and amazing shapes and then legitimising them by new parameters of energy efficiency or economic feasibility, perhaps there are other reasons as the basis of our social disengagement and our escape towards more reassuring certainties. Grand utopias built in the 60s and 70s superimpose on the previous urban structure, imposing the assertive rigor of their abstract geometry and the bigness not only of the buildings but also of the urban spaces – recalling the monumentality of historical public spaces, such as acropolises agoras and squares. These projects had two aims: representing the space built for the new man and educating the new men of the contemporary living.

Thus, if now it is right to revert architecture back to its social role and responsibility, it is also important that this new social task is aware of the limits and failures of a period when architectural choices were imposed from above and that must start again accepting a way of designing from below, closer to the people’s needs and more focused on the physical context. Therefore, smart city perhaps can represent an area of action for architectural research which is more aware but also more able to accept contemporary challenges.

Smart city is an extensive research area where the knowledge of multiple disciplines comes together. It is possible to find the word architecture both in the field of social sciences and humanities and physical sciences and engineering. Thus, if disciplines such as urban planning, technology or design have clearly identified their own area of work in respect of the main contemporary challenges, those who work on urban and architectural composition struggle to find its own specificity. Information is the raw material of smart city which is made up of more aware and well-informed citizens, able to play a more active role in daily life and emergency.

Technology is very important for the life of this 2.0 people but if the passage from the city to the smart city means only to replace the skin of buildings with a new sensitive one from the architectural point of view, then there is not much more to add. On the contrary, if this transition regards the transformation of fringe areas in public spaces, their physical forms, their reshaping, their positions and relations, then there are more interesting research opportunities for architecture.

Scala brought up the example of Water Squares in Denmark, designed by De Urbainsten, dedicated to the relation between water and city and was titled as The Flood. The Water Squares are flexible and multitasking spaces designed for different users. Usually these squares are dry and used as sports and leisure areas. During intense rainfall, water coming from the nearby waterproof areas is collected inside these basins where it remains until the sewage system is able to support a regular steady outflow. The smartness of a creative and innovative idea can supports the will of the public administration to be open by giving visibility to the money spent in building this kind of infrastructure. Infrastructure generally is constructed for rainwater management with underground tanks and basins hidden for citizens while the Squares are public spaces that not only improve environmental quality but also increase the citizens’ civic awareness and their social identity.

These squares create structures spread across the entire urban area producing new focuses in the suburbs but above all, they represent a smart public space that is no longer a monumental form evoking ancient archetypes. They are instead structures where complex relations and uses can be integrated. We can say that the smart city theme goes with the transformation of ancient public space, which is representative and homogenous, into the present, more eclectic, more interactive and multifunctional. It also goes with the change in architecture from an autonomous and or arbitrary discipline into a conscious research on contemporary landscape and city.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Smart city needs to move beyond the technological understanding to a more holistic approach including economic, social and governmental aspects, and architects need to find their place in such an urban transformation.
2. Architecture needs to acknowledge the present and past mistakes to sufficiently answer challenges present globally and locally.
3. Moving beyond technological application, architects can create smart solutions for urban challenges establishing a better city for the inhabitants and finding their own place and relevance.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How and why was architecture less focused on people’s needs and establishing solutions for them in the urban sphere?
2. Could this idea be a reason for suspicion towards architects as the urban experts?
3. What would you like to see as smartness in your own environment transcending the technological application?
4. Are you the smart citizen of your city?

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