AESOP Annual Congress 

In the “urban age” a smart city is an extended city which using technologies is able to reinforce advantages and to cope with disadvantages linked to massive concentration and to the increasingly rapid pace of change. The diffusion of smart devices has transformed citizens not just into clients that may enjoy the improvements (eg. from public transport to prevent congestion in streets) but also has transformed citizens into sensors, providers of the information that feed the system. All the actors from companies to governments claim that the citizens must be “at the center” of their interpretation of city’s smartness, but is it true? Smart technologies may allow the highest top-down concentration of command and control in the hands of those (public and private) that govern the platforms and receive data produced by sensors and, at the same time, a good opportunity for bottom-up and sharing initiatives.

The special session wants to invite participants to analyse the darker side of smart city in order to understand how planning can work to enlarge rather than to reduce the citizen’s power.