Seoul, indeed, under the Park’s mandate, focused on social innovation and sharing economy with the goal to favour a paradigm shift, a transition towards an innovation-led Sharing City. A city that can really be a place of freedom and conviviality of diverse and different individuals. Social innovation is considered a tool to realize this transition and transform urban space in an a more equal, free and fair space that allow citizens to own the city together and become the subject of conviviality. “It transforms the life of self-development for competition and consumption into a life of friendship and hospitality for freedom, dignity, and symbiosis, and enables us to imagine and create a more free and dignified life-cycle”.
Today the Seoul Metropolitan Government in its
goal to build “the City for All” proposes to take the results of the Sharing
City Seoul project, launched in 2012, and go further, transforming the city in
“a distributed and resilient” urban system in which expand democracy in its
participative version. That means develop Seoul into a “City as a Commons”.
This crucial transition will proceed on three trajectories that will allow to
create and enjoy the commonwealth and the common rule that is “urban commons”:
The Economic transition for sustainable circulation of resources for production and consumption
The Ecological transition that pursues inclusive growth with the recovery of the social-disadvantaged
The Social transition that makes social value accepted as core principles of social operation.
To deepen the reflection about this transition, the Forum gathered many experts that framed the Commons universe. The plenary morning session, saw the involvement of LabGov, that intervened with a presentation of professor Christian Iaione. He talked of the meaning of making a civil regulation on commons for the future of the “Sharing Seoul” and for the city’s new task, presenting the Co-city methodological approach and the co-governance project run by LabGov, bringing insights also from the Bologna Regulation on collaboration between citizens and the city for the care and regeneration of urban commons“ (here to explore the Co-City protocol and here to download the Co-Cities full open book).
Christian Iaione, LabGov co-founder, presenting at the Future Innovation Forum
On the main stage also Michel Bauwens that introduce a model of poly-governance for
the creation of a partner city based on meta-regulation. “The poly-governance mechanisms and institutions discovered by Elinor
Ostrom (1990) as the hallmark of the management of commons resources becomes
the new normal in institutional design. Poly-governance structures, possibly
matched by appropriate property mechanisms, consists at least of the three
levels (commons, state and market) but can be even more fine-grained, as the
work of Foster &
Iaione (2016) has suggested” ( see here for more information).
The following open discussion with Iaione and Bauwens involved Mayor’s Park, professor Ezio Manzini (Politecnico) and professor Lee Kwang-Suk (Seoul National Universty of Science and Technology) focusing on the meaning of transitioning from a sharing city to a commoning city and the importance to prevent neoliberal capitalism from coopting commons.
The inspiring morning was followed by four sessions in the afternoon:
Urban
commons and co-creation: how to build the commoning platforms in Cities?
Urban
commons and democracy: who owns the urban nature? Urban commons against
inequality
Tech-Knowledge
as Urban Commons for resilient community and
Commoning Public
Land
Every session saw the participation of many experts, practitioners, scholars, from USA as Neal Gorenflo – executive director and co-founder of Shareable, from Europe as Mayo Fuster – director of Dimmons Research Group at Open University of Catalunia, and several presenters from South Korea, coming from various sectors, in order to deepen both economical, ecological and social aspects around the topic of the commons.
The Forum gathered also a C.I.T.I.E.S delegation with representatives from Montreal
and Barcelona. The Case of Barcelona with its sharing ecosystem, the experience
around the topic of commons, and the birth
of the Sharing Cities Action, was also presented on the stage by Mayo
Fuster during the first afternoon session as best practice in the field.
The day closed with
the message from the Forum Director, professor Seoung-won Lee (Seoul National
University) and from the Head of the Social Innovation Division inside the
Seoul Metropolitan Government. They both stressed the relevance of this crucial
paradigm shift, the importance to incorporate and let thrive the commons to
really build a city for all and the relevance of connecting experiences among
cities.
After the government crisis triggered by Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s popular far-right party The League, Italy has now a new government in office. For the second time in the Italian institutional history, the Belpaese has a Minister for Innovation and Digitalization (the first time it happened it was in 2001). According to data provided by the European Commission Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2019, it seems to be an important achievement because Italy ranks 24th out of the 28 EU Member States in the DESI 2019 ahead only of Poland, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria among State Members.
In line with this situation, Mr Giuseppe Conte
has appointed Paola Pisano as Minister of Technological Innovation and
Digitalization in the Italian Government because of her experience on the
field gained serving as deputy mayor for
innovation at the City of Turin from 2016.
During her experience in Turin, Mrs Pisano has
contributing to the creation and the development of Torino City Lab, an initiative-platform aimed at
creating simplified conditions for companies interested in conducting testing
in real conditions of innovative
solutions for urban living. The project is promoted by the City of Turin
and it involves a vast local partnership
of subjects from public and private
sectors interested in supporting and growing the local innovation ecosystem.
During these years, Torino City Lab have
developed different policies such as AperTo,
the city’sopen data portal which shares internal data of different city
offices and EDU.LAB, a space open to confrontation in
the educational field experimenting the didactic experiences brought in an
innovative environment, animated by experts and with the central role of
professors and students.
At the present time, Torino City Lab develops
co-development solutions and testing in the following areas:
innovative urban services enabled by 5G technologies: city applications of artificial
intelligence and collaborative robotics, Internet of Things, augmented and
virtual reality.
autonomous mobility services with a focus on autonomous vehicles and drones
for the transportation of people and things.
Turin has been the first Italian city and among
the first in Europe to be connected to a 5G
mobile network: in fact, in 2017 an agreement reached between the City of Turin and TIM marked the start of the experiment,
expected to gradually extend the new mobile ultrabroadband infrastructure to
the entire city by 2020.
Then, re-launching the vocation of the automotive sector, the City of Turin
signed an agreement with the Ministry of
Infrastructures and Transport and others 14 partner to promote a new mobility service in a shared, assisted, safe and ecological view
integrating public mobility and decrease the time each individual citizen
dedicates to driving.
With regards to drones, Ms Pisano stated the importance of developing drones
technologies with the aim of traffic control, infrastructure monitoring and
things mobility. Moreover, Dora Park
was designated to be the testing area for drones operations due to its optimal position,
security conditions and technology infrastructure.
In the next few days, we will see if the issues
developed by Torino City Lab will be in the agenda of the new Italian Minister of Technological Innovation and
Digitalization.
Saturday 06 March at the Dopotutto Beer&Food Experience the third session of the co-design lab of the Local Action Plan of the Rome Collaboratory took place.
After a brief presentation of the activities defined during the weekly teamwork meetings, the session started. The participants, divided in groups according to the activities that they are developing, finalized the business plan and identified the stakeholders to be engaged in the sustainable tourism platform.
The Bike Tours group analyzed the documents needed to carry out the operation and discussed the possibility of including in the project an NGO that would provide technical assistance and support for the guides of the bike tours.
The Local Campaign group focused on defining an online and offline communication strategy aimed at promoting a narrative on the Heritage Site. The group also finalized the planning of the Living Memory Exhibition. The Living Memory Exhibition will include a contest of street art, photography, poetry and writing to involve the local creatives active in the district.
The Living Memory Exhibition & Heritage Site group proposed to set up a photographic exhibition in the Tunnel with musical entertainment involving local music networks such us the Popular Initiative Center of Alessandrino (CIP).
The session ended with the planning of the teamworks’ activities for the incoming week
According to Rakesh Kaul, Partner at PwC, “a smart city is an implementation of an advanced and modern urbanization vision”.
So, smart cities are structured to allow operational efficiencies, maximize
environmental sustainability efforts and deal with citizen services such as:
citizen identities management and
citizen participation;
payment system between people and
organization;
employment;
health;
culture;
transportation;
environment and space;
energy and waste;
land management;
clean habitat;
infrastructure.
In this economic, social, technological and
political context, these shifts are
reshaping the world and new challenges arise for countries and particularly
for cities. As governments are seeking to incorporate innovations within their smart
cities, blockchain can offer something
more.
So, blockchain’s role is quickly increasing
because it brings decentralization,
erases intermediaries, brings security
among the systems and interoperability
among users. To be clear, blockchain is a trusted distributed ledger
system across a network of users. It is a system, where the parties cooperate
to ease the transaction process, make it more anonymous and yet more secure.
According to Tom Zilavy,
IBM Blockchain and Cloud solutions,
blockchain can be utilized for smart cities in different ways: first of
all, blockchain can push citizens to smart
choices motivating their behavior: for example, thanks to a smart contract, public authority will
be able to automatically give you a reward
for a conscious good behavior such
as using public transport in your city; then, blockchain could increase effectivity offering the possibility
to have all the information in one database with participants having predefined
permissions to view or change (transact) the information they need (in the case
of a smart trashbin); finally, blockchain can make energetics efficient: for example, citizens
with solar panels on their houses could, thanks to smart contracts,
automatically trade their unused electricity with their neighbours and others
that are connected to the grid. These transactions would be executed
automatically, with the help of smart contracts and therefore effectiveness
would be achieved.
City worldwide are implementing blockchain
projects: Estonia has catapulted itself on the global stage as a
digital nation by proactively supporting blockchain
startups and embracing blockchain in its own operations. In this context, Tallin hosts, for example, e-residency program that allows anyone
to incorporate a digital enterprise in Estonia, without ever having set foot
there; the Estonian Cryptocurrency
Association, a nonprofit in Tallinn, has taken up the charge to help
promote the ecosystem locally and globally. In Singapore, Smart Nation
strategy seeks to transform former fishing villages into living laboratory
of innovation, and that type of proactive thinking is one reason it’s 2018 year’s world leader in blockchain. Singapore GovTech office is exploring a handful of
blockchain use cases, while the Monetary Authority of Singapore has pioneered a
decentralized inter-bank payment and settlements solution. Finally, the city of Austin in Texas is currently piloting a program in
which its 2,000 homeless residents will be given a unique identifier that’s
safely and securely recorded on the blockchain
Blockchain brings a lot of pros but there are a
great number of challenges still open. There is lack of coherent regulation, many players want to centralize blockchain and there is a need to increase performance, interoperability and reducecomplexity and cost.
In fact, among the difficulties faced by the various urban contexts, there is the one concerning poverty.
This article, written after the seminar on 11 October 2018, during the European Week of Regions and Cities, quotes as an example the six cities Barcelona, Birmingham, Lille, Nantes, Pozzuoli, Turin, which participate in the first call for proposals on the theme of urban poverty and which are adopting, with the support of UIA, innovative solutions to tackle this problem.
One of the most interesting aspects that emerges from the article is the one concerning the Public-private-community partnerships. In these particular types of partnership there is a more specific focus on what concerns the local foundation and the local development. In fact, the various target groups have been involved in the projects since the beginning.
A good example of how the Public-private-community partnerships can be particularly effective in combating the poverty is in the Co-city project from Turin where the municipality collaborates in the governance of the Commons with the various local associations and residents through the “Pacts of collaboration “. These are described by Christian Iaione, professor at Luiss Guido Carli and expert of the Co-City project, as “legal tool through which the forms of cooperation between city inhabitants and the City administration address urban poverty through an urban commons-based approach i.e. stimulating collective use, management, ownership of urban assets, services, the way infrastructure is implemented”.
