SMART CITY PLANNING: A SYSTEMIC APPROACH

“Smart City” seems to be the new dimension towards where every city should go. From an urban planning point of view, it’s not very clear what is the way to get this new dimension and moreover what actually is a “smart city”. At present, the questions very spread among cities are: how is it possible to become a smart city? Which factors are strategic to drive the city towards this new dimension? How can urban smartness be promoted? This paper tries to answer to these questions by adopting the systemic approach to study the city. This allows to consider the city as a complex system subdivided in three main subsystems (anthropic, functional and physical) which are basic in order to identify the city smartness components. These three systems are connected and interacting in the urban system and the smartness level inside the city can be related to their state. Technological innovation is another key factor interacting with the three subsystems. It plays a fundamental role for the smart city framing. The assumption of the systemic approach allows to argue that a renewal in urban planning (instruments and methods) must be affirmed to drive the city as a whole toward a smart dimension in order to reduce urban entropy.