Smart Rules for Smart Cities

New and fascinating examples about innovation in cities come from the real world. Every part of the industrialized world has indeed at least one case to show. But it is not just a matter of appearance, emerging economies may take the lead in the global economy growth forecast, but many studies show that the established top cities will continue to draw the wealthy for some years to come. Cities and network of cities will be the crossing point of the most important economic and financial initiatives. The catalogue of cities analysed in this section gives a synthetic representation of the measures carried out by some benchmark cities in the last ten years all over the world. Being a smart city is quite a complex goal to reach, both for cities to be designed ex novo (such as Masdar in the Arab Emirates or Caofeidian in Asia) as we will see at the end of the chapter, and for cities which have a long history behind them. Ex novo cities are also called top-down smart cities, while most of the examples reported next are bottom-up smart cities, that is, they start from existing settlements with different preconditions.

In this chapter, the issues of sharing of information and of information technologies use are dealt with from the juridical point of view, through a discussion about some general problems characterizing the relevant juridical debate. Then the urban forms and functions of the smart city are presented. Information technology can interact with the operational problems of the city and the use of environmental resources (energy, soil, water) is the leading parameter with which the urban and building transformations must be carried out. In this chapter, the complex issue of how to share the urban spaces and functions and to what extent such sharing influences the energy consumption is dealt with.

The necessary steps to build a different city that combines both sustainable development and urban quality include understanding of the events that emerge in different territories, identifying the appropriate actions, policies and finding innovative tools and procedures.

The frame within which the work is placed refers to the actions necessary to achieve the objectives of the coverage of the consumption of energy from renewable sources compared to the gross final consumption, posed to Regions by 2020, and that can be implemented through various actions involving local governments including the revision of the municipal building codes in a sustainable view. These actions are increasingly being recognized as energy planning tools for the territories where administrations have committed to the European project Covenant of Mayors. The discussion shows how the adoption by the Regions of Guidelines for sustainable municipal building codes can be a practical tool for raising the energy performance of buildings and the achievement of common goals of sustainability at regional scale. The work also aims at showing a concrete example of the definition of guidelines for the revision of the municipal Building Regulations for cities within the Sicilian Region.

In this chapter some difficulties for the financing of the energy efficiency measures are illustrated together with some juridical tools, which may support and facilitate the funding of the energy efficiency interventions.

We live in the society of knowledge, creativity and innovation: true anti-cyclical factors with respect to the crisis that has overrun the traditional development protocols and that requires powerful processes of creation and spread of knowledge. The true innovation has no boundaries, it has to affect each aspect of institutions and enterprises and operates as a mutagen of society, requiring a paradigm shift. Startups, fablabs, co-workers, makers and smart citizens have given rise to a global urban movement and most cities now have a sizeable colony: a true smart ecosystem for improving social innovation. Between them they are home to hundreds of accelerators and thousands of smart places and co-working spaces, and this ecosystem must be highly interconnected and integrated in a renewed urban metabolism driven by more adequate planning paradigms and tools. The combination of technological innovation and urban planning, however, is not only instrumental and determines changes within the community and its territory too. The “Third Industrial Revolution” and the gradual implementation of e-society have made it possible to delegate an increasing number of physical and intellectual tasks, even very sophisticated, to technology. In fact, the goods and ideas produced are increasingly less tied to a scheduled place and time, in terms of quality and quantity; the workplace is no longer an independent variable and time is no longer rigidly synchronized, especially as far as the intellectual work is concerned. The spreading of sensors, smart devices, electronic networks and urban life apps has created a proper urban cyber-physical space, consisting of the constant interaction between physical components and digital networks, tangible actions and intangible feedback. Smart cities are components of a new urban organism able to rethink the development and to encourage a “creative explosion”, leading smartness-based initiatives as part of a European post-metropolitan vision.