Co-Creative, Re-Generative Smart Cities. Smart Cities and Planning in a Living Lab Perspective

Abstract

A particularly mild approach in money supply over three decades at the international level has encouraged the piling up of substantial amounts of debt through urban investment, particularly in less competitive systems . It appears therefore necessary ato elaborate stringent "urban financial statements", through a kind of digital agenda able to provide georeferenced economic indicators about structure, value and performance of urban capital, and therefore capable to serve as a guide in future allocative choices of the myriad of holders of some stake of the above urban capital. Recognizing the role of such a multiplicity of stakeholders means to radically reconsider the transcendent assumptions of spatial planning in favor of an immanent view of it, also suitable as reference to integrate, in a single digital guidance framework, both the above georeferenced economic indicators and the expressions (“images”) coming from the stakeholders themselves. But it also means to refer to a model of self-governance of innovation, intended as a socially driven, organic process, embedded in scalable and resilient network ecosystems. This is essentially the mandate of a Territorial Living Lab, for which nevertheless governance is itself a matter for experimentation and innovation, as well of contamination with other models, within the objective of combining capital investments in urban regeneration with the need to attain an effective yield on such investments through diffused and citizen-based ownership of the urban innovation they aim to spark off.