“Smart City” is the narrow definition of the complex activity of creating a new space of interaction between citizenship and technology, man and machine, developed through the constant control and coordination between private and public agents, citizens and institutions of knowledge. The current political and scientific agenda is characterized by innovation, green transition, sustainability and integration, all goals that the majority consider fundamental. But how to balance them with the local territory? How to integrate innovation with human needs? How to implement the environmental sustainability with the social one? The studies on smart cities try to give an actual and practical answer to these questions. In order to understand this issue, it’s important to comprehend when the idea of smart city was born.
First of all, we need to turn back to the end of the nineteenth century, when for the first time technological progress was questioned, in the sense of putting the needs of the individual in the first place. The first two industrial revolutions changed the lives of human beings in a way that we can barely understand, from the production system to daily habits. The city became the beating heart of cultural and economic activity, giving space for the imagination to create utopian visions about future, inspired by the latest developments in science and industry. Ebenezer Howard, in his book “Garden Cities of To-Morrow”, published in 1898, spread the idea of balancing individual and community needs in the context of a flourishing capitalistic economic system, proposing a new utopian city which combines the best features of town and country: beauty of nature and social opportunities, low prices and high wages, bright homes and gardens with no smokes and slums, freedom and co-operation.
The core concept is interpreting technology as a tool in the hands of humans to fulfil their needs. This was deeply expressed and developed by the futuristic movement which propagated ideas about speed, violence, machinery, industry, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, namely all that which represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature. The translation of these features in urban planning was made by the architect Antonio Sant’Elia, author of the “Manifest of the Futuristic Architecture”, which can be summarize in the following words: «We must invent and build from scratches the modern city similar to an immense tumultuous construction site, agile, mobile, dynamic in every part, and the modern house similar to a giant machine».
This concept is realized in his “Città Nuova”, in which vast skyscrapers, grandiose multi-level traffic routes, bridges and aerial walkways create an immense and highly mechanized utopian city.
Another architect whose contribution was heavily important is Le Corbusier, who, with his ‘Ville Contemporaine’, rewrote the city standards, drawing an immense town capable of hosting more than three million people. The underlying idea is the same: combine human genius with the technological development; in this way the new three million people city is created around sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in curtain walls of glass, which represented the latest revolution in the construction industry at the time.
Those I have shown you are just a few examples of futuristic visions about cities and its inner activity. As I have shortly explained in the introduction, the concept of Smart City has evolved a lot during time; now it is highly more complex, it has to satisfy different needs and we have in our hands more sophisticated technologies. In conclusion, the purpose of this article is to emphasise that together with the technological development, the first and major tool for our societies is the human capability to think and create. A true innovation is possible only if we are first capable of imagining it. As Giulia Agrosì stated, <Research for humanity is the turning point of existence and the development is the proof>.
Tommaso Palmieri
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Bibliography
“Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces”, Margarita Angelidou
“La Smart City e la Città Comoda, una nuova realtà futurista smartiana”, Giulia Agrosi
“Garden Cities of To-Morrow”, Ebenezer Howard
“Manifest of the Futuristic Architecture”, Antonio Sant’Elia
“La Ville Contemporaine”, Le Corbusier