Centri della conoscenza: dispositivi urbani per la creazione di Smart Cities

The PhD research investigates the meaning of the paradigm of Smart City, or Intelligent City, that, from several time, started to be discussed and applied in diverse urban contexts in the world. Smart Cities are characterized by the presence of pervasive and cooperating information and communication technologies. These technologies improve the efficiency of urban resources' management and increase relations and interaction within the urban space. However, a Smart City doesn't prescind from the fundamental role of citizens in the urban space's transformation and development, for this reason information and communication infrastructure are primarily a tool for intensifying connections and exchanges among citizens. In a sense, according with the vision proposed in this research, a Smart City is not exclusively a concept through which efficiency and resources optimization are emphasized, as in the visions that represent the city as a machine constituted of technological cooperating components, but definitively suggests a more holistic vision, which considers the complexity of contemporary cities. This approach underlines that the city is constituted of several interacting components, human and non-human, that together create a complex ecological system where the technological tools, proper of the Smart Cities, can facilitate its management, without adopting rigid standards that limit its free evolution. The intensifying and multiplying of relations and interactions is therefore a concept at the base of the vision proposed by the Intelligent City model, where urban space's development is realized through new practices that enable novel opportunities for collaboration, based on a system of diffused knowledge. Context-knowledge is amplified by the information belonging to the digital space: urban space is increasingly constituted of digital elements that fundamentally contribute in shaping urban places, blending and integrating themselves into the physical space to which they relate and in which they are inscribed. The development of approaches and methodologies capable of facilitating transformational processes of existing urban contexts towards more intelligent configurations can be a solution for the problems faced by contemporary cities. Defining solutions capable to imagine the space as a construct integrating physical and digital components, whose distinction is ever more labile, it is possible to develop new criteria that design and modified cities sustainably, favoring the increase of quality of life for citizens. The research's unfolding has lead to observe how diffused knowledge and citizens' ability to cooperatively act are peculiar characteristics of intelligent cities, accelerated by pervasive urban technologies that facilitate the rapid diffusion on information and enable new forms of interaction through physical and digital space. Final results of the research define the Centers of Knowledge as conceptual devices that facilitate the creation of Smart Cities, suggesting material and immaterial forms with which generate intelligent urban contexts. The thesis is articulated into four chapters: in the first and second chapter principal theoretical references and best practices on Smart City are described; the third chapter contains the analysis conducted in Chicago, which is considered an optimum example of an intelligent urban context; in the forth chapter the concept of Center of Knowledge is explicated, describing the ways through which it can be shaped to develop new urban scenarios. Hopefully, the results of the research will provide a valid contribution in the rich debate around Smart Cities or Intelligent Cities, with the awareness that technological innovations and increasing experimentation of new modes of interactions produce rapid changes of the frame of references.