Smarter and Greener. A technological path for urban complexity

What means today “city”? What is its future? In respondence with revolutions and changes or with major human or environmental disasters, reflections attempting to answer these questions have often been raised. The theme has fascinated and created masterpieces of literature, art and architecture such as the writings on the utopian cities by Tommaso Campanella and Tommaso Moro or the reflections, culminating in drawings and projects, on the Ville Contemporaine and Le Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier. In the first case, the utopian cities were the result of a desire to escape from the decline of the feudal system and reflected the cultural ferment originated by geographical discoveries, by the new religious frontiers and by scientific progress. Similarly, for Le Corbusier: the push for change after the First World War and the advent of new technologies, gave rise to the Modern Movement and to the search of rigor, functionality and efficiency that aimed to directly improve life in cities. Even today, under the pressure of issues related to climate change, new migrations, digital technologies and urban systems congested by traffic, where poverty returns to be strongly present both visibly and silently, the the-me returns to be extremely actual, triggering various responses, involving different aspects of urban architecture and actors. Therefore, the question is if today, at the beginning of the 21st century, we can still consider our cities included in the dichotomous city-periphery model or whether the long digital net- works, together with the neo-liberal economic system and climate change, new poverty and new migration flows, are not configuring a different physical city, with new centres of exchange and reflection. This book aims to investigate these aspects, by analysing the results of some of the most used practices in the last twenty years and deepening the questions to which the contemporary city needs to give an answer. The book is addressed to medium-sized cities interested in understanding how to cope with the pressing urban challenges and how to use very practical tools for co-designing innovation projects with stakeholders and citizens. However, the same tools are designed also for architects and professionals that can become the needed hinge figure in the transition toward smarter and greener cities.