Envisaging Urban Changes for the Smart City: The Live City Information Modeling (LCIM)

The smartness of a city has to be related to the possibility of the citizens to take part in the process of managing the urban system. New technologies today offer enormous potential in order to manage and drive the sustainable evolution of cities. In other words, the new potential of digital innovation must be incorporated into new processes for managing urban transformations. Through the clever adoption of new technologies, it is possible to “see” and verify the transformation of the city in advance and take socially shared decisions. By putting in place new procedures, urban change can be envisaged ex-ante and a perceptual foreshadowing can be provided to citizens. Through this procedure, summarized in the abbreviation: Live City Information Modeling (LCIM), the inhabitants of the city, seeing where the transformation will be, play an active role in urban decisions, overcoming the need to get technical knowledge, and being able to evaluate, thanks to augmented reality, the opportunity, the effectiveness and sustainability of the city transformation. In this paper, we try to focus attention on these new ways to envisage the urban evolution by describing all the steps of the LCIM.