Several studies and initiatives suggest to extend the role of smart cities towards the smart territories, that shall be the ones for the implementation of services and technologies. As result, the smart cities and the living labs shall be unified, or – at least – the smart cities shall be seen as only a test-bed, the key-issue remaining that the ‘cities’ cannot be seen as the final answer for sustainability, quality of life, user-centricity and acceptability by the citizens as they cut-out almost the 60% of the European overall population.
The challenge faced by the authors is to scale-up the paradigm of application of the user-centricity from a small community to a wider one i.e. a smart territory, by scaling-up both the number of users (towards smart cities, smart territories, towards policies) and the concept of user (from citizens, to policy makers, to territories).
Each user-level, thus, shall be approached with a selected and specific target, as follow: smart cities and smart territories require, respectively, business integrated services and long-term sustainability and policy makers and government require 2.0 making tools and balance stability, respectively. As consequence, the needs elicitation shall be focused on four main pillars: 1) building up for Integrated Public Administrations, not only linked open data. “Smart cities are a great example. They create platforms, and use them, making open data and applications available – to citizens, to developers, to innovators, to come up with yet more ideas.” and more “The information from open public administrations is a rich fuel for innovation. The benefits are there for all to see: as citizens can enjoy new creative apps and services.”; 2) A network of policy makers, sharing target of optimization, strategies and continuous monitoring; 3) A task-force of smart-cities for the definition of a smart territory (even distributed) sharing innovation targets, discussing innovation in the form of ‘smart city solutions’, as a platform for cross-sector solutions (bridging ICT, energy distribution, transport & mobility and construction) as well as illustrated the huge potential of Big Data in urban contexts through open-data repositories and ICT (mobile) applications; 4) Full integration with living labs method for pre-testing technologies
biblio
- Francesco Niglia, Dimitri Gagliardi, Citizen Centric Governance in Europe, 4th Samos Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society, Conference Proceedings, 2013
- The Human Smart Cities Manifesto, Networking Citizen-driven Innovation, results of Peripheria project, launched in Rome, 2013
- Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, Creating tomorrow’s Internet, Smarter cities in a connected continent, SPEECH/13/671, 3 September 2013
- Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, Smarter cities in a connected continent, SPEECH/13/680, 5 September 2013
- Going smart and accessible in public services and cities, Report of Workshop 2, Digital Agenda Assembly 2013, 2013