From Smart City to Smart Region

This chapter aims at presenting the research project partially explained in this monograph (entitled The smart region between Turin and Milan: mobile services as drivers of spatial innovation towards Expo 2015 and developed by the Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU) in collaboration with Telecom Italia) by showing its origins in relation to its spatial scenario, the issues it deals with as well as the concepts it refers to and it promotes. Inspired by previous research conducted within the Osservatorio Milano Torino of DAStU and by multidisciplinary didactic projects developed within the Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP) between Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, the research project applyed its reflections to the spatial configuration of the Northern Italy mega-city region’s sector between Turin and Milan: a wide area where the recent completion of the infrastructural bundle is producing significant physical and socio-economic changes and where the large event of the 2015 Universal Exhibition is located (Fig. 1.1). Within this context, this chapter introduces the research focus, concerning the effects of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and, in particular, of mobile devices for the development of new services, spatial uses and collective behavior in the quest for a better quality of places, as well as the new research concepts of internet of places and urban digital nodes.

This chapter aims at describing the methodologies and outcomes of two research experiences (Fig. 3.1), which have been developed in order to test the concepts introduced by the research (smart region, internet of places, and urban digital nodes) and identify the relationships among the different scales involved (local, urban, and regional). Adopting the reference to the system of university campuses within the potential smart region between Milan and Turin, the first research project concerned the Città Studi university campus in Milan. This was chosen in order to explore the internet of places concept by optimizing access to university facilities through the use of mobile services, thereby enhancing the campus itself as a complex of urban digital nodes. The second research project sought to develop the internet of places concept from the university campus scale to the urban scale by applying it to a more extensive area of Milan comprising the Bovisa university campus and the 2015 Expo site. This was chosen in order to explore the urban digital nodes concept by identifying the best localization opportunities and defining the functional components of the UDNs system proposed by the research for the Milan’s north-western sector. These services specifically relate to the features of the spatial and socio-economic context in which each Urban Digital Node is located, as particularly shown by the UDN experimental application within the former QT8 market, at present owned by the Milan municipality.

This chapter aims at describing the several case studies, which inspired the localization methodology and the functional components of the UDNs. The most significant of these different scale projects are: (i) at the local scale, the Living Lab in Malmö; (ii) at the urban scale, the Idea Store public libraries in London and the 22@Innovation District in Barcelona; (iii) at the regional scale, the smart city-regionalism plans in Seattle. These cases were selected with the purpose of concretely verifying: (i) if ICTs are really able to modify the uses, organization and planning of urban spaces and how they could concretely stimulate urban regeneration processes (as in Barcelona) and urban services innovation (as in London and Malmö); (ii) how the urban smartness concept can be extended to the regional scale (as in Seattle). From this perspective, these case studies consequently made it possible to compare the theoretical ICT potentialities for spatial change and innovation (Fig. 4.1) with their real outcomes (which do not always correspond to the original goals), as well as identify ways to improve current practices, also on the basis of the research pilot projects explained in Chap. 3.

This final chapter aims at presenting the issues which could be investigated through the future development of the research. On the one hand, the proposed Urban Digital Nodes might be integrated with other kinds of innovative workplaces related to the current boom in knowledge-based, new manufacturing and sharing economy (and society) favoured by ICT development: that is, the new phenomenon of co-working spaces and fab-labs, based on the integration of physical spaces and ICTs, which needs to be in-depth explored. On the other hand, after experimentation of the internet of places and the urban digital nodes concepts on the urban scale, the potential application of the research outcomes in terms of methodology and contents at the regional scale should be tested (Fig. 5.1). Whilst a smart region should be considered both in relation to its single components (through the development of local-scale services, such as public spaces and facilities directly integrated and empowered by ICTs) and in its overall extension (through the development of large-scale services, such as physical and digital infrastructures at the overall regional level), methods and contents should be therefore applied to and articulated into spatial contexts which can differ in their location and/or their scale.