Territorial Planning, Smart Cities, and New Governance

Abstract

Everyday life, as well as retraceable in the current scientific literature, tells us that “we are” nowadays experiencing an epochal moment in the great transformation of communication and interrelationships systems between people, places, and communities through a new network of “flows” compared that, non-existent, of “only” 50 years ago. The networks of “functional relationship nodes”, nowadays, structure the territory and open the system to shaping—and planning/programming—of smart cities and smart lands. Indeed, together with the physical networks, those “invisible networks” shape a new urbanity of the territory, making it as an “open system” and “smart system” concerning the reference context by improving and enhancing social and cultural interaction and circulation of information and innovations. This research aims to define that medium of connection between the new urban/spatial models (smart-city and smart-land) and the governance process, in compliance with the notions of sustainability. Even more, we want to shape a way of governing that allows the more and more numerous actors to manage the transformations within the urbanized area. We want to achieve the definition of a new process of urban “construction” which could, and should, be subordinated to an increasingly better-defined relationship between decision-makers and citizens, by bringing into play topics such as “democracy, technology, technocracy”. A complementary aim is to explore the relationship between the aforementioned terms: each of them represents the development of processes capable of generating renewed urban and social paradigms able of increasing, or not, the quality of urban life.