Cities in Transformation: Smarter Reconstruction in Historic City Centres

This chapter analyses potential effects of highly innovative projects on historic centres from the technological point of view. It particularly aims to analyse the effects of the strong acceleration of the urban transformation of reconstructed historic cities after a disaster such as L’Aquila, an instable historic centre of Central Italy hit by an earthquake in 2009. In this historic centre, there are many innovation-oriented initiatives, that refer to the principles of the smart city, but the local context is incapable to transfer technologies and innovative solutions to create new effective services for citizens. The analysis of the case study of L’Aquila and scientific literature, which presents clear gaps on the subject, made it possible to identify two technologies macro-categories: tangible technologies and intangible technologies. In the context of these two macro-categories and in relation to the general theme of the application of these to changes in the historic centre, the research has highlighted a significant impact on urban design and on society, that it calls into question two concepts that the chapter seeks to reinterpret in a smart key: the conservation and protection of historical values, that direct or constrain the transformations of our cultural heritage (tangible), and new citizenship rights (intangible). It is a remarkable field of experimentation in which, however, scientific urban planning and design insufficiencies are compared, and where above all experimentation clashes with the acceptance of new technologies by local communities. The chapter stresses the need to re-create the concepts of conservation and citizenship rights, activating deep cognitive and mapping processes of local communities.