Historical and Urban Identity Issues in Smart Cities Projects for Small Towns

Abstract

The notion of “Identity” is often intended in smart city models as a digital feature, reducing a broad concept into a technical protocol to access urban services. Furthermore, this topic does not find place in the key indicators of smart cities rankings. Despite these omissions, the most recent smart city indexes have given more importance to social and cultural aspects in their frameworks, including topics as active citizenship, custom development objectives, wellbeing, and social inclusion. Coupling this trend with the need to preserve cultural and natural heritage raises the issue of city identity in “smart city” projects that often focus on performances rather than on considering cultural and historical values embodied in the existing context. This issue is even more important in small towns that are more prone to blend their innate characteristics if they assume digital transition as a top-down process that starts from bigger cities. This paper reviews the role of urban identity in smart city projects in small towns, analyzing the project of a smart cycling network in Castel Bolognese, a municipality near Ravenna. It has been selected because it presents an innovative approach for smart city projects in small towns, combining digital devices and urban design tools in an original way which contributes to preserve and develop the local identity. Thanks to the innovative approach of the project, Emilia-Romagna region funded this proposal within a call for cycle routes of regional relevance. The study was conducted by first framing the notion of urban identity, examining the most relevant literature about this topic. Secondly, we analyzed how urban identity is considered in the context of digital transition, benchmarking the main smart city indexes and their possible impact on this topic. Then, we presented the case study mentioned earlier, focusing on the main elements that concern urban identity: the infrastructural network, the accessibility to historical paths; the urban heritage, considering both the urban fabric of the city center and the listed buildings on the outskirts; the local culture and services, studying how the project supports the use of existing public spaces. The results demonstrate how design actions can have a sound impact on urban identity, using innovative solutions to improve the level of accessibility, regenerate historical public spaces, create values, and uses shared by public administration and citizens. The conclusions recapitulate the importance of several key points addressed in this study: the importance of shared goals and perspective, analysis and mapping, designing, and monitoring.