Towards a new narrative: from smart city to intelligent territory

Abstract

The situation of crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has made clear the role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have assumed in the management of our lives and our territories. ICT companies are developing new technological devices to combine the physical and digital dimensions, which find a particularly fertile field of application in the various models of smart city, digital city, green city…. Advertised today as the remedy to the economic, environmental and also health crisis, these models do raise problems and concerns, especially regarding the dynamics of power: Are we still able to control the technological devices we interact with? In search for alternative narratives of territorial planning, that question the responsibility of citizens on these devices’ impact on the territory, the article refers to the research conducted by the SMART CITY 4.0 Sustainable Lab.