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Are you interested in smart cities to enhance quality of life for urban inhabitants? Our summary today works with the article titled A multilevel method to assess and design the renovation and integration of smart cities from 2015 by B. Mattoni, F. Gugliermetti, and F. Bisegna, published in the Sustainable Cities and Societies journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see a smart city approach which tries to be holistic but specific. This article presents the assessment and design method where the city is considered as a whole human organism integrating each parts.

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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. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Contemporary cities are the scenes of sudden and numerous changes from social, economical and environmental points of view. Besides the urban population growth, productive revolutions have been changing sizes and forms of cities and activities and habits of citizens. Currently, urban areas consume majority of resources and emit wastes and greenhouse gases. To address urban challenges, different ideas surfaced, such as the smart city model. This term is still not well defined and is in continuous evolution. At the beginning, smart city was concentrated around technological aspects, but later, human capital was considered as the major factor, for the smart city to become socially inclusive. The city of the future will be a balance among hardware and software aspects, technology and human capital. The city of the future aims at realising and guaranteeing the quality of life to the inhabitants. The smart city concept potentially internalises the regenerative, enabling, creative and sensible urban approaches.

However, today there is a wide gap between theory and practice due to the lack of globally agreed definition. The meaning of the smart city differs based on who is presenting it and a practical planning methodology is practically absent. A model which can drive decisions and individual actions would be a powerful and appropriate tool. Basing on the local characteristics and referring to the realised smart good practices a planning scheme could delineate paths and guidelines for a complete and smart urban design. This paper aims to propose and outline a planning methodology of actions for planners, decision-makers, and academics that provides a holistic and specific approach to regions and cities to realise a smart city, and it builds upon the understanding of the city being an organism. The authors hoped that with their approach this organism can behave as a resilient ecosystem.

The common aspect of smart city projects across the globe is ICT because it is an enabling and accelerating factor. However, it often represents the ultimate goals instead of an instrument. Individual technological advancements are not enough to build the city of the future that should be resilient and able to learn and adapt to sudden changes. Smart city needs to have interconnections and interoperability across the different sectors to increase urban resilience. Therefore, smart city can only be the result of a coordinated and integrated planning in which individual or linked, spontaneous or strategized actions assume an overall meaning and may create a much more resilient and global order. A smart city grows out of a coherent and holistic policy vision of the urban developing processes where the governance is able to coordinate both public and private initiatives.

Such an efficient urban management requires the integration and implementation of the existing urban networks and the connection of new smart grids in others sectors. Humans are the urban and territorial nodes of the networks – they are the sensors, processors and communicators of information and data at the same time. With such integration, more complex projects can be developed, with better synergies and causalities.

The authors chose to work within the six axes established by Giffinger, from our first episode. The six aces are: smart people with social and human capital, smart economy with competitiveness, smart mobility with transport and ICT, smart governance with participation and smart living with quality of life. The main objective of a smart city project is to visualise the city as a unique organism and coordinate all the different aspects in order to appropriately manage their reciprocal influences among the axes.

The authors finally created five from the original six axes: economy, energy, environment, community and mobility. Economy is the engine requiring innovation, resources, dynamism and competitiveness. Energy is the nourishment of urban material and immaterial urban flows, including production, distribution and consumption with integrated management, durability and efficiency. Mobility is the infrastructure for material and immaterial flows movement, with the urban grid, public transport network and related services, and other logistical aspects of urban movement. Community is the fusion of people and governance highlighting the need for top-down and bottom-up approaches. Environment is the whole place where all of this is happening with nature preservation, revitalisation and restoration of the urban environment. The original smart living is at the heart of the smart city project and it should be the direct consequence of integrated actions developed through the other axes. Each function of the city cannot just be linked to only one axis. It can be the expression of two or more and it should be functional at least for two of these. To achieve this, an integrated city planning and management is needed. For example, a smart urban park can be part of the environment, community, mobility and energy.

Their territorial levels established the dimensions and administrative aspects. The widest level is the region with the aggregation of smaller settlements. The region’s role is to preserve and keep the local peculiarities. The intermediate level is the city, as the main place of territorial energy, social environment and economic transformations. Districts build up the city and they are the places where the primary links, relationships and activities are localised and established. This model with such levels consists in linked and integrated systems of action, specific for each urban settlement and empowered by the synergies identified among actors.

The territorial levels are the cells in which the axes are investigated. The five axes are the same for each territorial levels and they are made up of topics which are groups of different actions. The differences depend on the dimensional and operational aspects. This means that the actions and topics will differ for the region, city or district in the five axes. The model is based on the creation of integrated networks of actions belonging to different axes and these networks are specific for each territorial context.

This model was used for investigating the existing relations among urban and territorial networks, actors, and stakeholders, functions and activities, axes of action and multiplicity of visions. The network of actions and coupling of axes and topics are different based on the territorial level but some actions can appear at all levels. From a general point of view, the actions with the higher number of synergies are the ones related to the management, organisation, coordination and creation of networks of data. This highlights the need for integration and interoperability of different sectors, the careful planning of actions and strategies and the real time management of the territory. This reflects the three smart city factors: efficient processes, a clear vision and the involvement of citizens, representatives and local businesses.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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

1. The main objective of a smart city project is to visualise the city as a unique organism and coordinate all the different aspects in order to appropriately manage their reciprocal influences among the axes.
2. The authors suggested three territorial cells – region, city and district, and five axes – economy, energy, environment, community and mobility, in which actions can be established based on the local context.
3. All of this needs integration and interoperability of the different sectors to fully utilise the city’s network nature and involve all stakeholders, citizens, representatives and local businesses based on the smart city vision.

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

1. What about smart rural? We always talk about smart cities but why can’t smart rural exist?
2. What kind of node do you think you are? Are you only providing data or are you also processing it?
3. Which levels and axes do you think about? Are you thinking about your region, city and district, and your urban economy, energy, environment, community and mobility? What actions and synergies do you see to improve your quality of life in your city?

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