Ginevra Balletto

A Critical Reflection on Smart Governance in Italy: Definition and Challenges for a Sustainable Urban Regeneration

The aim of this work is to analyze the projects carried out by public institutions in the field of smartness, in order to reflect on the most effective mechanisms of governance. To this end, the paper is organized into two main sections. The first section provides a literature analysis of theoretical frameworks as they pertain to the role of political bodies, the policies, and their impacts on local communities in relation to the governance of smart cities. The second section explores the ongoing implementation of “smart city” projects in Italy, in order to understand how cities address their development perspectives from a conceptual framework to the construction of an actual urban space, faced with divergent politics, messy social systems, and different scales of urban governance. In this framework, disparities between urban governance scales and ideologies encompassing smart cities seem linked to the relational systems that local administrations can develop between neighboring cities. The final section summarizes the authors’ conclusions, giving particular attention to how networked urban systems are programmed, because they have been found to be key to strategic and transformative planning.

Environmental Sustainability in the Construction Industry Related to the Production of Aggregates Qualitative Aspects, Case Studies and Future Outlooks

Quarrying activity is a key-component of the GDP (gross domestic product) of industrialized economies, since various productive sectors depend on it. The mining industry also plays a strategic role as an employment source. In particular, the extraction of aggregates (sand, gravel, and crushed stone) is closely related to the building sector. By analyzing the building activity and its trend in time, this research will highlight the relations between quarrying activity and the construction industry, and will focus on its ability to activate the demand for aggregates, and how this could lead to environmental risks. Quarrying activity plays a role of strategic importance in the global economy. By securing a supply of mineral raw materials, such activity promotes the development of industrialized countries. The most common uses of aggregates are closely related to the construction sector: e.g. they can be used either without a difficult manufacturing process, as in road filling, railway ballast or armor stones, or they can be used in the production of high quality materials such as glass (quartz sands), ready-mixed concrete (made of 80% aggregates), pre-cast products, asphalt (made of 95% aggregates) (4), etc. Consequently, the resources of aggregates are used in the implementation of all built-up environments (3), in particular: • Housing: the construction of a typical new home uses up to 308 cubic meters of aggregates. • Civil Engineering (e.g. local hospitals, schools, bridges and flood protection, structures, etc.): the construction of a school uses up to 2,308 cubic meters of aggregates, whereas for a sports stadium, up to

Internal Areas and Smart Tourism. Promoting Territories in Sardinia Island

The paper tackle the issue related to the promotion of internal areas of Sardinia, considered the contrast existing between a strong, peak coastal tourism and a lower development in the internal areas. Considered the vast amount of cultural and environmental goods present in the territory, particularly in internal areas, in this paper we promote a mixed qualitative – quantitative method for highlighting more promising areas for targeting ad hoc policies of development. We start with a hot spot analysis of cultural and environmental goods in Sardinia Region, with particular reference to the internal areas. We then proceed with highlighting the municipalities or aggregation of municipalities presenting the highest concentrations of such goods. Then we qualitatively evaluate those events or sites generally more renown and appreciated, observing if local – municipal or regional – policies have been activated for their promotion. Observed that, we suggest possible interventions to enhance the touristic offer of such part of the Sardinia island.

Gentrification and Sport. Football Stadiums and Changes in the Urban Rent

In this paper we examine the changes in terms of urban rent and urban planning occurring after the introduction on the Italian law of 21 June 2017, n. 96 on Football stadiums property and management. Such law is actually paving the way to a set of new and still unexplored consequences on urban rents and urban renewal processes and real estate markets, as well as in terms of new patterns of urban behaviors. In detail, changes deal with the times strictly related to sport events, well scheduled in time (peak events), and those related to the ordinary life of the area (off peak events) as retail, transport and leisure/residential activities, often now coupled with the presence of such sport facilities. We briefly analyze some few Italian cases of football stadiums renewals, especially looking at those settled in cities hosting premier league clubs. We looked also at consequences they had in terms of urban rent, urban services. After, we started considering the possible implications that such investments can have on the cities that are likely to host such renewal processes in the near future, trying to highlight some possible changes in the “hedonic price” asset, and suggestions in terms of policy aimed at igniting a ‘good’ gentrification process.

City Dashboards and the Achilles’ Heel of Smart Cities: Putting Governance in Action and in Space

City dashboards have developed in the last few years as ways for aggregating and disseminating data related to urban areas to a wide range of citizens and city users. Such data come from official sources, in line with a growing policy of opening (public) data, as well as taken from the ‘big data’ realm. Dashboards were developed with different aims and design, in many cases still representing academic experiments and tests of city – to citizens interface and communication channels, rather than being considered as a consistent part of urban spatial planning policies. In many cases – as is the case of many studies and reports on urban areas – dashboards are used to produce indicators and indexes related to the performances of cities. However, such indexes are seldom used in planning as benchmarks for policies. In such sense, the use – or non-use - of such indicators in planning and governing urban territories remain one of the ‘Achilles’ heels’ of (Smart) cities. The idea of this paper, in line with other research carried on by different research groups, is of changing the model of urban dashboards from a linear one (that follows the logic of: data input – processing – visualization – information output) to a circular one (data input – processing – visualization – information output – indicators – use of indicators in planning – new data production – new data input). Here we propose a model for inserting data (results) of policies announced at urban level into such a framework, in order to allow users to understand the level of application of the different policies in time and the policy makers to evaluate the effects of such policies in different moments, so to calibrate their application in the future.

Smart City Governance in the Geo-resources Planning Paradigm in the Metropolitan City of Cagliari (Italy)

The purpose of this paper is to identify environmental issues related to the geo-resources demand, which arises by the new context of the metropolitan city of Cagliari, in the framework of the existing environmental and place-based policies. This is achieved through the correlation of the main planning tools (the Regional Plan of Extractive Activities [RPEA] for geo-resources planning sector, and the urban masterplan [UMP] for urban planning sector), in order to identify environmental indicators, useful for monitoring and for decision support systems. This comparison defined a new integrated methodological approach between urban, place-based and environmental policies, referring to geo-resources planning, in line with the newest paradigm of smart region and of the panarchy process. This approach allowed to evaluate the delayed impacts of UMPs, and its environmental impacts, resulting from the quarry activities of geo-resources (such as natural aggregates). In fact, quarry activity is the leading effect in UMPs (because the materials of construction are obtained principally by it), and it simultaneously decreases the environmental sustainability, increasing the environmental debt.

Urban redevelopment and energy saving The case of the incentives in Italy between risks and opportunities

Building construction consumes energy and materials. Even if the scientific community has developed two main voluntary protocols of building construction evaluation (BREAM and LEED), the authors argue that one of the main factors that could be incisive for a better environmental sustainability is to stimulate all possible initiatives, including the reuse of recyclable building materials, that currently, is a modest application. Based on this, the paper is organized in two parts. The first is an analysis of the Italian situation with regard to urban redevelopment and energy saving, considering the number of intiatives and costs handed out for each region. The second evaluates and proposes new insights on the basis of the