4. Reference Case Studies and Best Practices

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.