Editorial Preface. Smart Cities: Researches, Projects and Good Practices for the City

The concept of the smart city has been quite fashionable in the policy arena in recent years and the question of how we can live " smartly " in a city has become the focus of policymakers and private industry. The label smart city is still quite a fuzzy concept and is used in ways that are not always consistent. However, starting from a general definition, what is central to the concept of the Smart City and what makes it differ from 'sustainable cities' or 'ECO cities' is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the process of creating a more sustainable city but also the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure. Smart cities can be identified along six main axes or dimensions: a smart economy, smart mobility, a smart environment, smart people, smart living, smart governance. Millions of euros are being invested in research, development and pioneer projects which tried to contribute to the construction of more intelligent urban areas. The European Union (EU), in particular, has devoted constant efforts to devising a strategy for achieving urban growth in a smart sense for its metropolitan city-regions. However, after an enthusiastic first phase in which information technology and digital data were considered the solution for making cities far more efficient, some disappointing are growing around this theory. An article by Ludwig Siegele published in the Economist in 2012 analyses this phenomenon and describe the passage from top-down and bottom-up Smart Cities projects. He explain the main difference from the first Smart City ambitious projects that built shiny new metropolis on green fields—or in the desert as the famous Masdar in Abu Dhabi and the more democratic bottom up Smart City project developed in Amsterdam: a " smart-city platform " of institutions and infrastructure that helps businesses and citizens develop and test green projects. In the first top-down case the whole new cities are built from scratch and were thought holistically from the very beginning, the second case regards most European cities where the development towards becoming a Smart City happen within several bottom up stages. Some failures of the first and the achievements of the second, suggest that the smart cities of the future will not be those created from the top down, but those that have grown organically more intelligent. This reinforce the concept according to which being a smart city, is not just …