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An Ontological Analysis of Cities, Smart Cities and Their Components

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Technology and the City

Part of the book series: Philosophy of Engineering and Technology ((POET,volume 36))

Abstract

The arising of smart cities has shown the limitations of the traditional attempts to understand and characterize cities. The smart city marks a relevant step in the evolution of urban systems which is expected to have disruptive impacts in the near future. Indeed, the ‘smartness’ qualification of cities (and perhaps territories) points to relevant changes in the possibilities these complex systems offer mainly due to changes in the information which is made available. This chapter studies the notion of city from an ontological viewpoint, and provides the first elements of a general framework aimed to characterize and unify how to understand the city and its evolution. It starts from historical considerations to isolate the factors that drove the changes from ancient to modern cities, and the complexity that characterizes the nature of cities. Our analysis departs from the traditional views and leads to distinguish three ontological components in the city: the modified physical place, the distributed agentivity, and the knowledge present in the system. The analysis of these components and their interactions, we argue, provides a coherent reading of the city across its evolution steps, and may be used to establish the maturity of today’s smart cities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISTC CNR, Trento, Italy

    Stefano Borgo

  2. Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy

    Dino Borri, Domenico Camarda & Maria Rosaria Stufano Melone

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  1. Stefano Borgo
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  2. Dino Borri
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  3. Domenico Camarda
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  4. Maria Rosaria Stufano Melone
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Correspondence to Stefano Borgo .

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Michael Nagenborg  & Margoth González Woge  & 

  2. Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Taylor Stone

  3. Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Pieter E. Vermaas

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Borgo, S., Borri, D., Camarda, D., Stufano Melone, M.R. (2021). An Ontological Analysis of Cities, Smart Cities and Their Components. In: Nagenborg, M., Stone, T., González Woge, M., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) Technology and the City. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52313-8_18

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