The smart city: urban landscapes in the current crisis

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the notion of the smart, technological and interoperable city that has found growing attention in Europe and thus also in Italy, as a possible escape from the current and on-going economic, political and social crisis, and as a driving force for the creation of post-recession cities. In the article, the idea of “slyness” applied in the Italian context to the concept of landscape, (Farinelli, 1991) is borrowed to present the urban model of “smartness” on two levels of analysis: the first is the discursive representation as it emerges from policies and from grey literature; the second is related to the (possible) socio-territorial consequences of its application. In doing so, the paper gives space to the representative and discursive levels, as much as to the processes of territorialization implicit in the smart city paradigm.