A Critical Reflection on Smart Governance in Italy: Definition and Challenges for a Sustainable Urban Regeneration

The aim of this work is to analyze the projects carried out by public institutions in the field of smartness, in order to reflect on the most effective mechanisms of governance. To this end, the paper is organized into two main sections. The first section provides a literature analysis of theoretical frameworks as they pertain to the role of political bodies, the policies, and their impacts on local communities in relation to the governance of smart cities. The second section explores the ongoing implementation of “smart city” projects in Italy, in order to understand how cities address their development perspectives from a conceptual framework to the construction of an actual urban space, faced with divergent politics, messy social systems, and different scales of urban governance. In this framework, disparities between urban governance scales and ideologies encompassing smart cities seem linked to the relational systems that local administrations can develop between neighboring cities. The final section summarizes the authors’ conclusions, giving particular attention to how networked urban systems are programmed, because they have been found to be key to strategic and transformative planning.

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