From Smart City to Smart Region. Digital Services for an Internet of Places

This book is partially derived from the outcomes of the research project entitled The smart region between Turin and Milan: mobile services as drivers of spatial innovation towards Expo 2015 (developed by the Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU) in collaboration with Telecom Italia) which were the starting point for the development of this publication. This research project shares the criticisms brought against the concept of urban smartness (such as the risks of an excessively technocratic and market-oriented approach to city management and planning and of an increasing social segregation in city use), but it acknowledges the potentials of the smart city concept for urban development (such as spatial regeneration, economic and social innovation, environmental sustainability). Within this context, it investigated the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for the representation, promotion, management and dissemination of an integrated system of services; it explored the spatial impacts of digital services at different scales (local, urban, regional); and it sought to understand how a system of mobile services can encourage new spatial uses and new collective behaviour in the quest for a better quality of places. The book suggests the redefining of well-known spatial and conceptual references, which are taken from the disciplinary debate in the fields of new media and urban studies, and which may be related to the Internet structure (based on nodes and hypertextual connections activated by the nodes themselves): • the smart city concept can evolve into the smart region concept (identified by an area dimension), which refers to the metropolitan region between Milan and Turin selected as the spatial context of the research because of its specific features and potentials for innovation; • the Internet of things concept can evolve into the Internet of places concept (identified by a network dimension), which refers to the integration of physical and digital services and represents the specific issue explored within the spatial context of the smart region through adoption of this experimental approach to certain urban functions important for innovation of the metropolitan region (for instance, university campuses); • the urban node concept can evolve into the urban digital node concept (identified by a point dimension), which supports the development of the Internet of places concept from the scale of urban functions (such as university campuses) to a wider spatial scale by intercepting different categories of users (inhabitants, students, city-users).