ECO-SMART GOVERNANCE IN THE TRASFORMATION PROCESSES OF FUTURE CITIES. Masdar City: A Model for Sustainable Cities

In a time of great transformations, which are capable to affect the geopolitical and economical global development, urban systems are the most touched scene on which the main future’s challanges are reflected. The general tendency is projected onto a bigger development, which is supported by urban agglomerations even more than before, and it looks pretty clear, nowadays, that the current schemes won’t be able to be replicated, tout court, in the future. The urban areas will be seen as opporunity sources, but as big challanges as well. Globalisation, demographic evolutions, pandemics, are actually transforming the very city features, new needs are emerging and they tend to require a more integrated and including kind of urban patterns, the entire innovation is aiming to a tactical management of the natural resources, to new mobility models and to a better lifestyle quality. The crucial element, able to make the cities of the future face a global period of economical, environmental, social and medical crisis is confirmed to be intelligence. Even the concept of “smart cities”, which was originally born with a mere energetical and technological value, is now assuming a more comprehensive and various meaning, which aims to face the real emergent requirings, not least of which is the actual medical emergency: it implies a serious thinking on the re-scheduling and the re-projecting modalities of our cities. The cities of the future are going to be the place where the conjunction of administrative choices will contribute to create a “smartness governance”, in order to improve citizens’ lifestyle’s system, from a social, economical and environmental point of view. Small and average cities, such as the ones of the mediterranean area, are going to be the ideal prototype for this kind of experimentation, since they combine the geographical benefit with the one of a future economical outgrowth. Indeed, the only possible path for small cities is to undertake a smart route, by creating township’s nets with similar features, and by generating common politics based on crowdsourcing in order to innovate the digital development of the city. A city reconsideration is then needed, and so are transformation approaches and the traditional assets. Smart urban systems are not an option anymore, but they become a mandatory necessity. A smart city can, without any doubt, represent a valid response to the emergent needs which have been enforced by rapid and unavoidable global dynamics, that’s because innovation has always been a determinant element for urban system’s growth and the fact that this role is going to increase itself in the future is evident. It appears essential, in a contest like the mediterrean area one, which aiming for an "increasingly" smart city "represents an opportunity to put the enhancement and sustainability of the urban area at the center of the 2030 agenda of the countries, within a reinvented system of governance, which focuses on a strong idea of the future, without forgetting the past.