Technology for Democracy in Smart City Planning

IJPP ­ Italian Journal of Planning Practice 3

Paolo De Pascali

ISSN: 2239­267X

Associate Professor
Via Flaminia, 72 ­ 00196 ­ Rome, Italy – paolo.depascali@uniroma1.it
Dipartimento di Pianificazione, Design, Tecnologia dell'Architettura ­ Sapienza Università di Roma

ABSTRACT
In recent history the relationship between technology and urban
planning has been variously taken into account (and possibly also
undervalued), but lately it has come into focus with the maturation of
the concept of the Smart City.
Building on an analysis of documents dealing with the issue and
current experiences, this paper tries to determine which opportunity
factors the new technologies are offering for the improvement of
urban planning. In particular it considers how these technologies are
being integrated into the processes of participatory planning thus
supporting the development of direct democracy.
The resulting complex framework suggests four main fields of
application where the new technologies can contribute to addressing
contents and governance of the plan for an urban organisation that
enhances virtuous behaviours and steers the town’s residents towards
adopting them.

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1. THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT IN PARTICIPATIVE URBAN PLANNING
Within the present general framework of advanced technologies supporting
social participation in urban planning, two main fields or macro­areas of
application stand out, characterised by the different factors and timeframes
taken into consideration for changing the urban organisation.
The first one covers the instrumentation aiming to help participation in the
decisional process and implementation of the urban plan. It is a field of
relatively old origin rich in elaborations and applications. Though articulated
in various ways internally, it essentially includes the software tools
(Planning Support System, PSS; Decision Support System, DSS; Simulation
Model, SM; Public Participation Geographical Information System, PPGIS;
etc.) for following formalised procedures to implement wide community­
based decision paths as well as the diverse more or less complex systems of
participation via the Web (weblogs, thematic fora, webGIS, Web meetings,
e­learning, etc.) including the latest social networking systems1.
From the study of this macro­area another field deserving attention and
investigation has emerged. Linked to and derived from the former, it
concerns the advancement of technology applications toward the growth of
participatory democracy in urban planning through a further widening of the
functions described above as pertaining to the first field. Obviously this step
forward appears dialectically connected to the changes intervening in the
physical and social context of the urban model.
Thus the first field includes tools to assist decision­making processes and to
widen stakeholder participation. Certainly what this instrumentation now
needs is to be translated into widespread and, in particular, effective use.
However it appears by this time as a set of established methodologies having
high potential for application but narrow space for evolution. The second
field covers instead a matter at present far less structured in terms of
technologies and application systems and refers to physical and

Consultation and Public Participation”, OCDE Publishing 2001, the technologic tools in
support of participatory urban planning can be classified into five categories: tools for
information, education/training, dialogue, consultation (voting), and decision making support.

Structuring further what is shown in the OCDE study “Citizens as Partners, Information,1

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socioeconomic forms of urban organisation notably different from the
current ones. The reference for the first field is the urban environment as
things stand now, considered from the perspective of transition towns by
plans basically dealing with more or less complete phases and processes of
change from the town of today to one that is eco­efficient in terms of
governance and resource use. Here further research is helpful in order to
compare and evaluate the different procedures and tools and to direct
pervasive applications. The second field open to research looks instead
further ahead toward visions of future towns grouped under the still not very
explanatory label “Smart City”, which is of late increasingly drawing the
attention of public institutions, private organisations, and individuals.
The idea of the Smart City was born from the powerful push of advanced
technology manufacturers and installers who saw in the proposal of a future
town an efficient marketing tool for business development2. It is only
recently that, beside the early strictly technological characterisation of such
an idea (given by computers, networks, power plants, energy distribution
nets and consumption applications, and so on and their management,
regulation, and control systems), more comprehensive patterns are
emerging, foreshadowing new socioeconomic and physically functional
models of the town linked, first and foremost, to new cultural and
behavioural models of a general nature embodying the use of said advanced
technologies within a systemic and synergic set. The relational dynamics
within this complex system include and promote the pursuit of new
settlement models acting in turn as a process­pushing factor.
On the basis of these systemic aspects we can individuate a few attributes
characterising specific technologies or groups of technologies capable of
providing support in directing the urban plan towards specific settlement
models. These technologies are featuring as:

(ICT) sectors, soon joined by those of energy technology concerning in particular the
efficient use and renewable sources of energy.

The idea of the Smart City first came from the information and telecommunication technology2

­ pervasive, that is, most widely diffused (“distributed”) and employed
also at the individual level;

­ embedded, being built into components of current use and thus,
with regards to fruition of the town by its inhabitants, embodied in

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The last paragraph in this paper provides descriptions of a few applications
presenting the above attributes whose potential opens new horizons to the
use of technology for developing participative democracy in urban planning.
The dialectics of the settlement model as the driver and product of new
systemic urban sets now taking shape in the notion of the Smart City is thus
signalling the onset of congruent guidelines for aligning the town planning
project to it.
2. BEHAVIOURAL URBAN PLANNING OF THE SMART CITY
Scant consideration is being given to the urban plan by the now fairly
extensive literature on Smart Cities. This is particularly true for the documents
– and initiatives – of the European Union, a fact that unfortunately may
depend on the traditional, and in some respects taken for granted, lack of
knowledge (due to disesteem, undervaluation, or unawareness) of the urban
planning discipline or at least because the latter is drawing very little interest
at European Community level3.
The above circumstance may also be linked to structural characters of the
concept itself of the Smart City, which, be it right or wrong, could be deemed
not very congruent with the traditional principles of urban planning.
Going over numerous documents directly or indirectly related to the idea of
Smart Cities (a selection of the main documents consulted is provided in the
reference list), it is possible to extract a few general connotations, or

Framework Programmes of the EU. Even the last FP (VII Framework Programme) denies
it recognition in its work programme and identity as a research area capable of generating
significant results for the advancement of knowledge and knowledge applications. Also,
no specific actions on urban planning are foreseen in the programme of the EU Initiative
on Smart Cities (http://setis.ec.europa.eu/about­setis/technology­roadmap/European­
initiative­on­smart.cities).

As it turns out, for example, from the little importance attributed to Smart Cities by the RTD3

the residents’ lives;
inclusive, involving the residents not only as contributors of

personal positions but as direct actors in the planning process too,
and thus moving away from the purely centralist­technocratic
approach to close in on a bottom­up one.

­

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elements, which seem in prospect to characterise its plan and to collide in
some cases with the current principles of the urban planning discipline.
Most assuredly the Smart City opens wide the doors to technology in
particular by grounding its construct, as noted before, on the primacy of new
(and renewed) technologies of value to the town.
In recent history the relationship between urban planning and technological
systems features for not having been especially favourable to the latter in
terms of consideration in the configuration of the urban settlement. Still now
in the prevalent conception the technological systems are assigned a
subordinate role in designing the plan in comparison with other factors such
as morphological control, collective urban equipment endowment, urban
rent control, safeguarding of the historic and cultural heritage, and so on.
Urban technology, and in particular the new technologies, integrated in
infrastructure networks, building systems, services, and collective spaces,
“follow” the plan which is so characterised in its contents by scant or no
consideration or significance as regards technology. In this multiple causes
concur, including relevant cultural factors linked to the urban planners’
education, training, and competences and, still talking culture, to the modus
operandi and impermeability to innovation of the main dialogue partners of
the planners, that is, the building contractors. However the Smart City does
not tally, or does so very badly, with the leading current way of planning (a­
technological plan), and, vice versa, such a way does not tally with the Smart
City given that it does not ensure direction and help for its deployment.
The Smart City approach requires reversing the stance towards technology,
in the sense that the technologies or rather their applications become basic
elements and starting points in the planning process. So in its directions for
the physical and functional organisation of the town the plan should also
configure itself, mainly on the basis of values and choices of a technologic
nature. This is a first element that is distancing the urban planning discipline
from the Smart City; the opposite also holds true.
Linked to this is a second element distinguishing the urban plan for the
Smart City. The massive introduction of technologies into the town aims at
improving the quality of life and rational use of resources but also at being a
driver of economic growth. Urban technological innovation is acknowledged
as a factor of competitiveness for enterprises, contributing to the productive

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and cultural specialisation of the whole town or parts of it. In this context,
planning of the physical urban organisation has to directly or indirectly match
the theme of the local growth expressed in terms of sustainable development4.
It seems that in other ways and with other ends, and hoping for better
results, the relationship between planning and development established
during the 1970s (the so­called “season of programming”) is going to
reopen. The themes are different in that they are focusing not on heavy
industrialisation and urban armature but on how, by means of the new light
technologies and the provision of new specialised services, the organisation
of the town may, in these times of global competition, concretely generate
assets for urban marketing and contribute to a sustainable local development.
However the discipline of urban planning, for years folded in on itself in the
search for a specificity based essentially on methodologies and procedures
for the normative plan, seems unprepared for tackling the present critical
themes of socioeconomic development requiring different specialist
knowledge, competencies, and (most of all) sensibilities to connect with the
context and real processes of our time.
The third element, emerging later but overbearingly from conceptual
elaboration, is the factor relating to the intense component of participatory
governance characterising the Smart City, undoubtedly the widest ground for
a localism understood both as extensive decentralisation of institutional and
administrative powers and development of participatory direct democracy.
In general the local approach to “city smartness” is seen as structured on
three progressing levels describing actions of the local authority5 whose
meaning is patent, that is:

principles (e.g. those of H. Daly) towards an evolutive idea, particularly as regards the
definition of urban sustainability or sustainable urban development. Reference is made
here to progressive design such as that of the transition town combined with the notion of
eco­efficiency.

The concept of sustainable development has undergone many revisions of its first orthodox4

1. leading by example;
2. governing the private urban actors;

Systems, http://think.eui.eu
See e.g. Smart City Initiative; How to Foster a Quick Transition towards Local Sustainable Energy5

3. conceiving and implementing an integrated approach at the local level.

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The third level is the nearest to “city smartness” and the one most
characterised by decentralised powers and widened participation (though
with some centralised decision­making, anyway, performed by local bodies
acting as process leaders).
Actually there is also a fourth level, dealt with hereinafter, but even going no
farther than the third level a directing line stands out pointing to the plan as a
process more than to a defined and codified “product”. The general plan, as
currently intended, seems to be slim in content, lose all operativity, and also
to limit its strategy to far­sighted visions and a few structural elements. But
under the thrust of the intense factor of decentralised participatory
governance the action of the urban planner takes the characterisation of
continuity and is converted into “planning by doing”. The plan becomes
more “work ongoing” than a stable document. So the planner also acts as
animator and facilitator of participatory processes and eventually may take
charge of, or serve as, an interface for activities of information,
communication, education, and training, which, by the way, present
significant features from the technological point of view.
Technology shapes the plan not only as regards interventions in the town
(plants, infrastructure, systems, components, materials, etc.) but also
operates in the planning process. Therefore it seems that the urban plan
should be able to manage a complex elasticity, on the one side tending
toward a structure complying with the relevance of technology in urban
interventions entailing precise and definite choices (but transformable and
not irreversible ones), and on the other being dynamised by the push of a
participatory governance imposing flexible and interactive planning. In this
context the technologic value can increase its driving function in the urban
plan until it reaches the role of bearing the structure of the plan itself.
The fourth element of adjustment of the urban plan consists in structuring it
so as to direct the town residents toward virtuous behaviours. The plan tries
to direct the construction and requalification of the physical and functional
town to adapt its environment to emerging positive behaviours (e.g. “carbon
free” ones) but also and above all to promote and tendentially enforce them.
In any case the objective is to gain “virtuosity” by means of incentives and
disincentives, constraints and facilitations, and also through the educational
effect provided by a physical town expressly designed to develop virtuous

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behaviours (consider for example the case of car­free quarters). The town is no
longer only the response to behaviours of its inhabitants having more or less
negative effects on the community, but becomes a spur to the development of
positive environmental, social, economic, and emotional ( i.e. aiming to ensure
emotional welfare) attitudes and behaviours pursuing common objectives of
urban quality. Urban planning will succeed in contributing to the attainment of
the global and local sustainability targets set by the extant international
agreements most of all by focusing the attention on a town configuration that
helps to modify the behaviours of city residents.
This kind of urban planning, which could be defined as behavioural, aims at
affecting urban ways of life, favouring or contrasting them by means of the
physical and functional configuration of the town, or of parts or elements of
it, but at the same time is directed to progressively and dialectically act with
the abovementioned flexibility in order to contribute to modifying the
cultural model along a virtuous loop.
The fifth element characterising the urban plan for the Smart City,
highlighted in the literature and directly or indirectly descending from the
four above, is its elaboration path. The distinctive features of relevance of
the technology, inclusivity, flexibility, and behavioural incidence
recommend starting from the bottom, that is, taking a bottom­up approach.
The urban part (quarter, district, etc.) proves to be the proper logic for
ensuring operativity and effective deployment of said elements6. Evidence of
this is given by the recourse to the energy parameter for organising the
territory in energy basins or by use of the participatory factor to define
optimal territorial dimensions ensuring direct participation efficiency.
But the Smart City also needs a top­down systemic integration of its parts on
the basis of one or more overall structural elements, more or less simple and
progressively pervasive, in order to combine the parts themselves into a
body reducing differences, supporting synergies, and first of all favouring
the development of the physical and functional organisation of the urban
settlement7.

2:5, “A metropolis is composed of regional centres, neighbourhoods, districts and corridors”.
See e.g. A. Duany, J. Speck, and M. Lydon, The Smart Growth Manual, McGraw Hill 2010, point6

infrastructure described and analysed by many authors, and with regard to its imposing energy
Consider e.g. the territorial organisation of Greater Copenhagen around its energy infrastructure7

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Thus the Smart City plan is generated by the dialectic convergence of the
two approaches to decision­making (bottom­up and top­down) and two
fields of intervention (small scale and large scale) in ways which for now
seem far from having been defined. It is highly probable that the traditional
path of elaboration of the urban plan will be followed only in part, but
clearness is not the strong point in Smart City planning. As a matter of fact
even the expression “Smart City” appears more and more a self­referential
one being used to characterise the multi­dimensional value, grasped more by
intuition than specifically decoded, of the concept inherent in it8.
It seems obvious that a given urban set is smart because of the smartness of
its component parts but the problem is to understand in depth what this
smartness is made of. Nowadays however the use (or should we say
misuse?) of the expression is spreading, so continuing with it we can think
of, and make reference to, Smart City planning in terms of both contents
(connectivity, ecology, local development, rational use of resources, safety,
comfort, and so on) and ways and processes of elaboration and
implementation of the urban plan (flexibility, inclusivity, interactivity,
reversibility, incrementality, etc.).
A sixth element characterisation of the innovative plan covers the changes in
the framework of the operators involved in urban transformation.
Urban planning has traditionally chosen the main interlocutors between
economic operators involved in the construction industry and buildings
(builders, promoters and developers, general contractors, real estate
companies, engineering companies, etc.).
With the birth of the metaphor of the digital city in the 1990s, subjects have
appeared from other areas9 but are too weak to be interlocutors of the
planning or to become agents of urban transformation.

infrastructure in particular see Lars Gullev, Heat Plan for the Capital Area of Denmark
(http:// www.e­pages.dk/dbdh/11/) and District Heating in Copenhagen
(http://dbdh/images/uploads/pdf­diverse/ District_heating_in_Copenhagen.pdf).

interlinked subsystems (smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people,
smart governance); see:
http://www.safecity­project.eu/index.php/mod.pags/mem.detalle/id.10/relcategoria.1077/
relmenu.5/chk.8def43cf5ccb30aed0f0c0433f2c3eab

In comprehensive and heterogeneous terms the Smart City is considered a system composed of8

“… Digital cities have been initiated by three distinct actors: 1) non­profit electronic community9

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Instead, very powerful economic actors with significant weight come into
the Smart City: structures outside the construction industry, coming from
industry in the strict sense and industrial services, such as companies
operating in different fields of ICT, in the production and distribution of
energy, in transport, new materials, bio­agro technologies, advanced
logistics, innovative finance, and so on. These sectors, unlike the
construction industry, are characterised by intense processes of
internationalisation and high sensitivity and interest in research and
innovation. The match of international competitiveness is played in the city,
in big cities but also more and more in medium­sized cities.
Implant consultation with these parties includes the possibility and need to
make significant changes in the manner and content of urban planning, as
mentioned above, and also to expand the cultural level of the negotiation.
At the moment the problem is, however, to understand whether these actors
are willing to take on the role of new agents for urban transformation or
whether their role is confined to that of applicators and sellers of pre­
packaged systems and technologies to fit with the slightest change of the
existing city, as appears to be the case at present. It is unclear if the new
entrants, that is, willing to take on the role of changing the genetic structure
of urban transformation, with all that entails in the revolution of modes and
content, or leave the field to the old actors and are satisfied with the
subordinate role of suppliers.
3. TECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS FOR URBAN GOVERNANCE AND

BEHAVIOURAL PLANNING OF THE SMART CITY
The ongoing elaborations about technology applications for smart urban
planning are filling a catalogue that is growingly bulky and articulate.
Herein, however, it is difficult to distinguish what could be defined as
simple technology marketing from the presentations of instruments clearly
susceptible to real incidence in the physical and social urban context (in the

forums such as the ‘freenet’ movement in the US, 2) commercial services as local
information portals by private companies, and 3) governmental initiatives for city
informatization. …”, Mika Yasuoka, Toru Ishida and Alessandro Aurigi, The Advancement
of World Digital Cities, http://cs.gmu.edu/~jpsousa/classes/895/readings/0933.pdf.

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race to smartness the city sometimes gets lost).
After a specific survey and analysis of the catalogue above four fields of
applications might be identified in which the new technologies can
contribute to bringing developments in the elaboration and governance of
the urban plan. The list is not intended to be exhaustively comprehensive
regarding the possible relationships between technologies and plans.
However, on the basis of the analysis made, these fields appear at present to
be those where the most interesting potentials of said relationships are
emerging. They are also showing a direction for observation and
interpretation of oncoming developments predictably full of proposals and
applications. Their reference frame as regards methodology and operativity
is the one sketched before, centred on processes of continuous planning and
“planning by doing” and marked by a specific structural value definable as
behavioural urban planning. As an additional character of the physical and
functional urban plan, this value aims at contributing by means of the plan
itself to progressively guide the town residents towards virtuous behaviours
and support them in practising them, mainly with regard to issues of
environmental protection and eco­sustainability, with the purpose of directly
involving them in the decision­making and implementation phases of the
planning process. Regarding this, it seems that the new technological
applications tend to put special value on interactive communication between
the individuals and the local community and to promote the participation of
the former in the management of the latter within the urban planning
context. In four fields, dealt with in the following, technology seems capable
of providing an important support given that in the development of planning
processes it is increasingly serving functions that are in some respects
inescapable. These functions refer to a first contribution provided by the
application itself of advanced technology (new and better services, rational
use of resources, better comfort, increased urban competitiveness, etc.) and
to a second one brought to the advancement of democratisation processes in
local planning and administration. Such processes are seeing the use of
technology as the constituent element along their whole progress, so
technology applications go beyond a role of simple support to become an
integral part of the methodology and path of urban planning. Lacking
technology, the plan would be impaired if not even impracticable.

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3.1. Systems for perceiving individual impact
Considering the features of the new local governance, the necessity of
continuous personal involvement in the attainment of the objectives fixed by
the plan in conformance with the modalities and behaviours it establishes is
increasingly evident. To this end great import must be placed on the
continuous and timely provision of information to the inhabitants about their
own personal incidence on the urban context and the indirect effects on it
produced at the very moment when a given behaviour is adopted.
One of the cardinal factors in implementing the plan consists in encouraging
perception of the personal impact. Planning becomes a process of co­
operation, with the residents showing their individual positions and therefore
their behavioural congruence with respect to the attainment of established
objectives. The first step along an effective participatory path is that of being
aware and understanding our own role within the urban system.
Recording the individual impact with suitable elaborations may at the same
time provide continuous checks on the effects on behaviours that the plan is
producing. Deviations from what was foreseen can provide inputs for plan
recalibrations or more radical changes.
At present various experimentations are underway, in different sectors and
also applying different technologies, including:

­ on­line and real time computerised systems calculating carbon
dioxide emissions at a given moment or over a time span;
recording systems, which also provide georeferential information,
recording daily displacements and more or less habitual behaviours
in using urban spaces (for parking, services, sport) as well as their
effects on health;
more or less sophisticated measuring systems and devices to ease
the demand side management of instant energy in dwellings,
offices, and so on and for forecasting purposes;

­

­

real­time location and tracking systems for produced or differentiated
urban solid waste, also signalling the place of destination and
disposal modes;

­

­ devices and systems for monitoring and managing the use of public
spaces and collective urban infrastructure.

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Other important information, spreading and evolving over time and on
which townspeople focus attention, concerns the economic and financial
effectiveness of foreseen or already implemented technological applications.
Correct and continuing individual information on economic costs and
benefits of measures adopted on a large scale, such as that of the urban part
or whole town, plays a fundamental role in their acceptance, successful
deployment, and in case sequent development. This holds true particularly
when the measures directed to individuals are linked to their own specific
behaviours. It is to be noted, for example, that the various technologies
available for the abatement of polluting emissions show economic unit
values that are very diverse and also quickly evolving over time, compared
to expected results; determinative is the case of the wide ranging unit costs
of carbon dioxide reduction per technology10.
Continuous personalised information also acquaints people with their own
contribution to the return on investment and payback period of the technology
considered, ensuring, moreover, a perception of its cost­effectiveness. Without
this kind of information, people’s appraisals may remain grounded on false
or outdated knowledge. All of this helps residents to get over the so­called
“Tragedy of the Commons” dilemma, according to which in the urban
environment, as in the global one, technical measures to be adopted or already
implemented to give immediate individual benefit often result instead only in
inconveniences and sacrifices (be these real or supposed on the basis of the
current cultural­anthropologic model).
3.2. Systems for continuous monitoring and interconnection of the urban
settlement
This field includes a number of pervasive technologies essentially based on
sensors and systems for the transmission and elaboration of the data which
the sensors, conveniently placed, are collecting from the whole urban
settlement or sizeable or particular parts of it. Inputs are also provided by

see Impact of the Financial Crisis on Carbon Economics. Version 2.1, 2010 and
http://209.172.180.115/clientservice/sustainability/pdf/Impact_Financial_Crisis_Carbon_Ec
onomics_GHGcostcurveV2.1.pdf

McKinsey & Company publishes the unit cost curve of emission abatement per current technology;10

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cell phones and other mobile devices as well as through the Internet11.
These applications result in complex and evolving systems for continuous
monitoring which record crisis points in the town settlement and deviations
from what was planned. When forecasting models are in use, moreover, they
can be continuously validated by comparison with the collected and
elaborated data. Building on this information it is possible to gain
competitive advantage for local firms and urban marketing and to develop
specialist finalised services for the benefit of the urban organisation and
public or private operators (e.g. information on buyers’ behaviour, tourists,
use of services, etc.).
For a planning design that is not only functionalist, the experiences aimed at
recording the emotional relationship of affection and attachment between
persons and urban places appear most interesting; the basic concept here is
that of “place identity“. The experiences of bio­mapping12 fall into this
category and aim at drawing emotional cartographies recording people’s
reactions linked to places by means of portable electronic tools. Coupling
the two technologies GPS (Global Positioning System mobile technology)
and GSR (Galvanic Skin Response sensor technology), individual emotional
variations are detected and registered on a satellite map. Integration and
elaboration of a plurality of individual records allow the compilation of
collective emotional cartographies; from these it is possible to directly draw
up plan proposals or define participatory planning process paths. Anyway,
all of this can be seen essentially as an evolution enriched with technology
applications of K. Lynch’s studies on the human perception of the city.
These systems, when related to those concerning the perception of
individual impact reviewed supra at point 1, appear to serve a reciprocal
function in order to make explicit the urban impact on both the individual

(http://www.minteos.com/), winner of the Mind the Bridge Competition 2011, appears very
interesting. It is a system of environmental monitoring permitting real­time gathering and
elaboration of data provided by a net of wireless sensors distributed over wide natural or
urban areas and employed for land and town plans and also to forestall natural and
environmental disasters; see also the Smart Cities platform from Libelium, which allows
system integrators to monitor noise, pollution, structural health and waste management
(http://www.libelium.com/smart_cities/).

There are many systems already available and operating. The platform Minteos11

See Christian Nold Emotional Maps at http://biomapping.net/new.htm.12

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and the community. And all these systems are grounded on the existence and
efficient working of a wide wireless network, designed to create a shared
and interconnected urban set and necessary to link projects and initiatives
strengthening the connection between interests and needs of the different
urban actors. Processes of communication transmission may also make use
of systems of amplification and intensification of information and messages
employing sophisticated technologies of augmented reality13 that allow
georeferential localised images and graphs of urban phenomena to be
superposed on information from the net of sensors.
Another important advantage, not to be forgotten, is the reduction of the
costs of drawing up the plan entailed by using these systems when fully
operational. Automatic gathering and provision of the up­to­date reliable
data needed by continuous planning cuts survey costs and minimises
incertitude levels.
3.3. Systems for health protection and for managing safety and emergencies
The issues of security and emergency bear increasingly on the urban plan,
which, more and more, is being asked to incorporate them in its provisions
and interventions particularly when concerning the requalification of
existing settlements.
Making use of specific advanced technologies as well as the network system
described above for continuously monitoring the urban set and its parts,
steering virtuous behaviours, and adjusting or recalibrating what is planned,
the establishment and activation of safety and emergency plans is thus
becoming an integral part in the design and implementation of the general
urban plan.
Security is essentially meant as individual and community freedom from
danger, risk, or injury at the level of the quarter or other urban part, whilst
emergency refers not only to natural catastrophic events but also to sudden
dangerous conditions of the urban infrastructure and services (power

htpp://www.planningtoplan.net/session­5­back­to­augmented­reality­part­2;
http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVIII/part1/10/10_01_Paper_106.pdf;
http://www.inria.fr/en/innovation/industrial­sectors/energy­transport­sustainable­
development/demos/artefacto­augmented­reality­and­urban­planning;
http://nguyendangbinh.ord/Proceedings/ISMAR/2002/papers/ismar_ishii.pdf.

With regard to the use of virtual reality systems in urban planning, see e.g.:13

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blackouts, public transport blockage, waste disposal emergencies, etc.)
demanding immediate action. Actually, however, reference should be made
to the wider concept of dependability more than to the above one of security.
The systems in heading not only have to be reliable but must also be seen as
such in the eyes of their users in order to optimise and increase their use.
This clearly apparent feature of reliability leads people to use the systems
they trust. Dependability thus becomes a complex characteristic, the
synthesis of many attributes such as reliability, maintainability, availability,
performability, safety, and security14, which can be translated into practice
through the integration of information and telecommunication technologies
with the applications of several branches of specific technologies for
protecting the territory, the built­up area, and the inhabitants. Dependability
plays an outstanding role in urban liveability and must be evaluated and
applied from the first phases of planning the town system.
This category includes the integrated systems and devices for health
protection as well as those for the inclusion of people with disabilities and in
general of persons potentially or actually at risk of social exclusion.
In particular, there is now keen attention to the issue of “city health”, to be
understood as “the town for its residents’ health”, read not so much in terms of
provision of medical care as in terms of prevention and specific responses to
diseases, even with the complexities all this entails, ensured by the settlement
organisation itself15, and so tackling the concepts of disease from the
perspective of social factors and behaviours induced by the urban structure.
The field of new technologies for urban security, regarding in particular
those systems and devices to combat crimes against property and persons
(aggression, terrorist attack, theft, extortion, kidnapping, etc.), presents
ambiguous interpretations and critical applications.
In various writings Stephen Graham (see References below) points out that
this attention to security and the corresponding growth trend of these urban

Laprie, and Brian Randell, Fundamental Concepts of Dependability.
http://www.cert.org/research/isw/isw2000/papers/56.pdf.

On the concept of dependability see Algirdas Avižienis, Vytautas Magnus U. Kaunas, Jean­Claude14

built environment see the interesting exhibition “Imperfect Health. The Medicalization of
Architecture” by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal,
http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/1538­imperfect­health.

On the difficult issue of the uncertainties and contradictions in the idea of health in relation with the15

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technologies, in both rich countries and poor ones, corresponds in fact to an
insidious process of urban militarisation.
In the sense that the centralised use of these pervasive technologies actually
conveys systems of social exclusion, segregation, racism, political
discrimination to defend the interests of dominant groups and classes. The
poor and the disordered are excluded, as well as minorities, non­state actors,
social movements, and other struggles. Indeed these systems are used
against them to build the city of the rich or the “revanchist city”.
The new security technologies become an instrument of social control,
separation, and marginalisation, which is also in evidence in the physical
organisation of the city16; in this way the conditions of real colonial war,
fought in the same city in terms different from conventional ones but with
similar aspects and results, are gradually being created.
The survey work described here moves along the opposite direction to the
discriminatory use of new technologies highlighted by Graham. The basic
approach of the investigation is precisely the study of the potential of social
inclusiveness in the application and management of these technologies. The
goal is stated in the title: the examination of the characters and contexts of
application of these technologies to contribute to the development of
democracy in urban planning.
There is a good chance that this will happen; Graham is also optimistic
about the enlargement of the social context, in particular with regard to
access to these technologies by social movements and communities: “There
is a politics of data and of digital information in the city expressing the need
for robust, democratically organised social movements to really harness
these technologies in their full range”17.

walls, fences and barriers with biometric scanning. It adds killer robots and cyborg insects to
the revitalising sciences of urban fortification and ‘control architecture’. And it blurs globe­
straddling attempts to track people, information, money and trade to a proliferation of more
or less militarized or securitized camps, bases, security zones and enclaves. Many of these,
however – far from being split­off from the world – are linked together through the very
circulations and infrastructures that make neoliberal globalization possible” – from S.
Graham, the New Military Urbanism, in Nonkilling Geography, edited by James Tyner and
Joshua Inwood, Center for Global Nonkilling, 2011, http://nonkilling.org/pdf/NKgeo.pdf.

“… Rather than castles, city walls and siege warfare, however, the new military urbanism combines16

Urban Militarism: Excluding the “Disordered”, S. Graham interviewed by Vijay Nagaraj, 1317

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3.4. Other systems for direct involvement of the residents in local urban
planning: the case of energy and the new energy technologies
Under point 2 above, after listing three levels of local approach to “city
smartness”, mention was made of a fourth one, with which we shall now deal.
This fourth level is reached when participation takes the form of residents’
property or joint property with local authorities and infrastructures and
plants serving quarters, districts, or other urban parts. The most advanced
implementation line consists in the establishment of comprehensive
(inclusive) structures of an entrepreneurial kind, similar in many ways to
public companies, in which the inhabitant or partner, bearing on the
administration of the service, plays at the same time the roles of owner,
producer, and user and is thus compelled to reconcile social, economic, and
environmental interests which usually conflict when these roles are played
by separate actors.
The energy sector proves particularly suitable for this approach; in Denmark
for example a relevant share of the overall energy system is covered by
residents’ co­operatives, also established thanks to specific national support
policies18, ensuring relevant social, environmental, and economic benefits to
both the individual partners and their local communities.
It has to be said that two evolving systemic drives are converging on the
development of energy localism and its role in the reorganisation processes
of settlement: on the one hand the increasing decentralisation of legal
jurisdiction and powers, which is reaching the matters of energy and the
environment; on the other the development of the process of liberalisation
and privatisation of the energy markets. This second drive is countering the
traditional monopolistic­centralist model of national energy systems.
Proposing wider and distributed new systems tendentially promoting the
local context in their operational planning and therefore modifying the
relationship between energy and territory, this opens an important new
potential to the local plan.

13 September 2011, http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/vijay­nagaraj/urban­militarism­
excluding­disordered.

See http://dbdh.dk/images/uploads/pdf­key­articles/best­practice­in­danish­district­heating.pdf.18

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In many countries the opportunities offered by these changes are being taken
by several local communities, on the initiative of far­seeing local authorities
or groups of residents. Experiences are even at an advanced stage in some
Northern European states.
Especially suitable for the development of these local participatory
initiatives are the new technologies of rational use of energy (RUE) and
renewable energy sources (RES), in particular the systems for district
heating and cooling by combined heat and power generation from traditional
and renewable sources (biomass, urban solid waste, etc.), the small­scale
combined heat and power generation plants (micro­cogeneration), and wind,
thermal solar and photovoltaic power production systems as well as the
recent “smart grids” using more or less complex ICT systems for optimal
on­time matching of the fluctuating energy demand with the energy supply
from a mix (depending on the different particular circumstances) of carbon
and renewable sources.
By installing these technologies, by the way, the residents’ participatory
initiatives mentioned before can obtain additional income for their proceeds
from energy generation through the sale of the white and green certificates
or other negotiable titles obtainable by their low­impact plants.
All this highlights at least three points having relevant importance in the
plan and project of a Smart City:

­ The inhabitants directly contribute to modifying their behaviours as
regards urban sustainability through their choice of efficient
technological applications of low environmental impact. They are
led in this direction by the conformation itself of the planned city.
The inhabitants can also participate financially in planning the
town, or parts of it, and in implementing what is planned. Moving
beyond the logic of immediate profit maximisation, at least part of
the income from their sales of energy and related services may be
allocated to interventions for the enhancement of urban quality (e.g.
parks, social housing, etc.) and reduction of global urban impact.
Energy efficiency and environmental compatibility, both typical of
these applications, may be considered ribs of the urban plan, that is,
structural values for the pursuance of urban development and
settlement requalification within the logic of collimating energy

­

­

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4. CONCLUSIONS
The survey and the previous elaborations suggest some preliminary conclusions:

demand and supply exactly on those ribs. Since setting out the plan,
these new systems may be taken as the basis for establishing the energy
basin or district, the functional mix, the dimensions of intervention, and
the whole urban physical and functional organisation.

­ The widespread application of advanced technologies characterises
the visions of the future of the city (Smart City); this setting directly
and indirectly affects the physical and functional organisation of the
city, but can also be a formidable factor in the evolution of the form
and content of urban planning in terms of the advancement of
participatory democracy.
This prospect of redefining the plan is based on some structural
features of these technologies that are pervasive, embedded, and
inclusive, facilitating the insertion of the individual in participatory
processes and urban management.
In the configuration of the new directions of the plan, however,
resistance to innovation must be overcome and some problematic
elements that characterise the traditional approach to urban
planning must be dealt with, including:

­

­

The modification of current approaches concerning the cultural
foreclosure of technology in planning; technology should be one of
the cornerstones of contemporary plans; the idea of the Smart City
is not in line with the a­technological plan, and vice versa, the latter
does not lead to the Smart City.

­

The consideration that the massive introduction of new technologies
in the city should serve not only to improve quality of life and the
efficient use of resources but also to promote socio­economic
development; new technologies in planning as engines of local
development and competitiveness.

­

­ The incorporation of advanced governance in devolution of powers
and participatory processes; technology shapes the new plan not only

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De Pascali ­ Technology for democracy in Smart City planning

in content but also in the process of preparing as regards information,
training, communication, decision­making procedures, and so on.
The addressing of physical and functional organisation of the city to
encourage and accompany virtuous behaviour of people (behavioural
planning); not making the city conform to the behaviour of the
inhabitants, but planning the city to generate the behaviour.
The acquisition of the dynamic value of the plan produced by the
dialectic convergence of two operational directions (bottom­up and top­
down) and the two fields of intervention (large scale and small scale).

­

­

The facilitation of change within the framework of the actors of urban
transformations giving roles to new entrants. In the smart city this
opens up the possibility that the traditional interlocutors of the urban
plan are at least partially replaced as agents of urban transformation
by the producers of advanced technologies and services. The plan
must take this opportunity to facilitate innovation and development
processes and raise the cultural level of the negotiation.

­

Specific fields of technological applications seem to open up
interesting possibilities for the development of planning processes
in terms of advancement of direct and inclusive participation in
planning and urban management; technology application seeks to
go beyond the simple role of support to become an integral part of
the planning methodology.

­

The widespread urban application of these new technologies,
particularly those for security also involves, however, possible
misuses in the direction of systems marginalisation, segregation,
and discrimination which find evidence in the production of
functional and physical organisation of the city; their use in the plan
must be considered under the democratic control of the community
in terms of inclusiveness and enlarged urban management.

­

Advanced technologies, properly implemented, enhance the dynamic
and evolutionary value of the plan; the direction is towards the “plan­
process” and “planning by doing”. The dynamic characterisation of
the plan is likely to drive the dialectic of city–behaviours and to
respond appropriately to the information obtained in real­time.

­

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