The chapter aims to analyze the role that digital innovation has whenever it is connected in shaping urban spatial and functional transformations. It is capable of governing any kind of urban project that must find a new platform to engage in diverse modernity. The smart city implementation is one of the results of the new relationship between technology and physical settlement, but it still does not find methodological completeness as it is still linked to connected sensors and numerical flows of data. The chapter explores the critical issues and opens up new research paths following the study of some ongoing urban experimentations as have been amplified in the ongoing new phases in this post-pandemic 2021. The digital network can be a newly established matrix for both the territory and cities, just as roads and railways networks have been in the past – if it becomes a work of public interest on par with conventional urbanization infrastructure ones.
TopIntroduction: Research Objectives
The relationship between the infrastructural development/endowment of both territories and cities has become central to public action since the industrial revolution, in which the new organization of work called for a more extensive transport network (Mantoux P., 2015); thanks also to the participation of the private sector who has contributed to the innovation of the process by introducing product innovations (Santagata F. A., 2016). Nevertheless, the endowment of new (digital) network infrastructures is linked to a positive economic development only and if it is capable of creating synergies with other existing (physical) infrastructure's networks. At the same time, it must be able to activate a virtuous update loop, given that the evolution of applications can easily open to problems of planned obsolescence of equipment (De Leonardis F., 2017). The digital infrastructure network is indeed a means for development if it establishes up-to-date interdependence relationships and full integration with other infrastructure networks (transport, water, energy, and green).
This complex theme introduces the need for a new approach to the organization of the city as it exposes the need to re-weave the relationship between ICT and urban spatiality, between virtual and real, hence the intent to create new ones by reusing the existing ones; the digital allows, indeed, to free oneself from the constraint of proximity and to introduce new uses - and new possibilities - in pre-existing buildings and urban spaces, which are freed as a result of the possibility of carrying out activities in a different way, no longer linked only to the physicality of the place1. But digital can foster innovations in the spatial and functional organization of the city if it is not only intended as a further element that is added to the pre-existing ones but if it opens up to methodological innovations, as it happened with the industrial revolution and as it was experienced - in a different way - by the sudden acceleration in digitalization due to the quite long global pandemic look down in 2020.
Background: A Look Back to the Past
In the opening, we briefly address a critical look at the relationship between technological evolution and the spatial and functional city-forming processes. Although from the second half of the nineteenth century reinforced concrete was added in the practices of building (Degenne J., Marrey B., 2013), it becomes a matrix of methodological innovation only in 1923, or rather when Le Corbusier set out the five points of architecture (Le Corbusier, 1923). A similar discourse was for urban planning (Finotto F., (2001): the train and industrial innovation initially favored the reorganization of urban practices and the timely redesign of urban functions in the 19th century (Sica P., 1977). But we must wait until the year 1933 when, because of the development of the automobile, again Le Corbusier reveals the urban methodological innovation of the Modern Movement within the “Charter of Athens” (Le Groupe CAIM-France, (1943). Furthermore, the relationship between technologies and the city opens up new scenarios well anticipated in the “Futurama” exhibition included in the New York General Exposition held from 30 April to 31 October 1940. On this occasion, Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the pavilion, reworks the model city “The Shell Oil City of Tomorrow” - created for the Shell advertising campaign in 1937 - which provides, for example, the automatic control of traffic with television feeds based on the relief of local traffic jams conditions.
From these two examples, now historicized, one measure a time shift from the initial introduction of the innovations into the practices and the subsequent methodological awareness. In other words, disciplinary knowledge is waiting for technological experimentation to complete its initial selective product steps to face more complex methodological issues.