Smart & Fab: enhancing resilience in post- industrial urban environments

The concept of Smart City is often expressed in the ability of a city to adopt cutting-edge ICT tools. This paper proposes an alternative approach based on the idea of self-organizing Smart Citizens. The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative model of sustainable urban regeneration binging together ICT technologies with local projects fostered by citizens in cooperation with policy-makers and local enterprise networks (SMEs). Open source movements do not involve all citizen and they often neglect those who lack the means to participate. The spread of FabLab networks throughout the city could be a feasible response to open innovation, involving local communities in the identification of specific needs and fostering community-design of innovative solutions and products. This model is applied in the post-industrial area of Ferrara, Italy, where the proposed mix of functions (cohousing, Vertical Farm, coworking spaces and FabLab) aims to encourage cooperation between citizens, entrepreneurs and policy-makers towards an inclusive and resilient Smart & Fab City.