Smart urbanism and digital activism in Southern Italy

Emerging Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities in Urban E-Planning

Carlos Nunes SilvaUniversity of Lisbon, Portugal

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Chapter 6

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8150-7.ch006

Smart Urbanism and Digital Activism in Southern Italy

ABSTRACT

This chapter debates the competing approaches of the smart city model. It starts by critically discussing top-down approaches, focusing on influence of neoliberal urban experimentation, the role of dominant social interests, the reduction of the city and of urban citizenship, and the risks linked with its uncriti-cal assumption. Then, attention shifts on counter-geographies of digital urbanism drawn from below by citizens, communities, and social movements, as part of a fragmented landscape of activism engaged in building alternative and bottom-up approaches of the smart city. Making use of the case study of a city in southern Italy, Catania, the aim of the chapter is threefold since it discusses the critical aspects linked with dissemination of smart city model as a means for investigating the evolutionary neoliberalization developed in southern Italy during last decades, the influence of neoliberal scripts of urban planning on policy practices, and then the potential alternative activities of digital urbanism hold for a more human-centered and socially embedded smart city.

INTRODUCTION

The buzzword smart indicates a new visionary city which is directed at the planning of hi-tech-oriented urban efficiency and sustainability. The smart city is being promoted and advertised en-thusiastically by governments, corporations, and even academies as part of national responses to austerity, while cities are increasingly compet-ing with each other to become the context for the pilot testing of a wide range of neoliberal urban experimentation focused on technological

solutions. Although this process may be global-izing, its operationalization and outcomes remain stubbornly local and context specific. This opens up new spaces for the promotion of local alterna-tives to dominant neoliberal political economic practices and to the technocratic determinism of the smart city model.

This chapter is structured in five sections. The first critically analysis top-down approaches of the smart city planning model, focusing on relations with neoliberal urban experimentation, the role of dominant social interests, the reconfiguration

Arturo Di BellaUniversity of Catania, Italy

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of the city and of urban citizenship, and the risks linked with its uncritical assumption. The second section debates the potential grassroots practices of digital urbanism hold for an alter-native and a more human-centred smart city of the future. The third section scrutinises the implementation of top-down approaches of the smart city in southern Italian cities during neoliberal transition. The fourth section pays attention to the already existing practices of digital urbanism promoted by active citizens and social movements in a city of southern Italy, Catania. The chapter concludes by calling for a combination between top-down and bottom-up approaches of smart city, in order to build urban technological design on a perception of smartness that includes the conflicts inherent to the different collective urban cultures and experiences.

The aim of the chapter is threefold since it discusses the critical aspects linked with dis-semination of smart city mobile model as a means for investigating the evolutionary neolib-eralization developed in southern Italy during last decades, the influence of neoliberal scripts of urban regeneration on governance arrange-ments, territorial imaginaries, and policy prac-tices, and then the potential alternative practices of digital urbanism hold for a more progressive and socially embedded smart urbanism.

The theoretical framework through which this topic is examined includes critical studies on urban neoliberalism, smart urbanism and digital activism. Methodologically, the analy-sis is developed by reviewing the ever more abundant social science literature on smart urbanism, in particular ‘grey’ literature (confer-ence presentations, institutional and research reports, on-line papers), and previous analysis conducted during last years on digital activism in the city of Catania.

URBAN NEOLIBERISM AND THE TRIUMPH OF SMART CITY

In the context of what has been termed cultural-cognitive capitalism (Scott, 2011), together with a technological and informational vertigo that gives fresh impulse to capital accumulation, there has been an on-going internationalization of policy regimes, which involves the communication of neoliberal and market-oriented policies as best practices orthodoxy and the mobilization of certain neoliberal policy models through the mediation of fast policy circuits (Healey, 2013; Prince, 2012). A growing number of policy makers and urban leaders, persuaded by specialist intermediaries, gurus, centres (think-tanks, cultural, university-based) and corporations, as well as by international agencies, such as UE and World Bank, in the form of public policy programmes and investment incentives, increasingly tend to invoke stories, ideal types, visions and models of urban planning, often as the panacea for the many pressing problems of contemporary cities.

In the post-recession context, the buzzword “smart” indicates a new visionary city, based on the integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) applications in certain key dimensions, such as energy, mobility, buildings and governance, which through the negotiation between, and the incorporation of, economic imperatives, ecological integrity and social equity goals is directed at the planning of hi-tech-oriented urban efficiency and sustainability.

In smart city visionary framework, a multi-objective approach of integrated urban, ICTs and digital data development is presented in order to challenge problems of economic growth and com-petitiveness (smart economy), accessibility (smart mobility), quality of life (smart living), social capital (smart people), political efficiency (smart governance) and environmental performances (smart environment) (Giffinger et al., 2007).

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In investigating how in an age of ‘market trium-phalism’ new urban models address a post-global recession context, scholars interrogate whether the aspirational discourses of smart city compete with, or are complementary to, neoliberal urban narratives (Gibbs, Krueger, & MacLeod, 2013). Far from being homogeneous, smart urbanism consists of competing narratives (Luque, McFar-lane, & Marvin, 2014) enacted by a multiplicity of social interests and actors, from public and private sectors to communities and social move-ments. Nevertheless, most of the critical studies recognize that smart city strategies are tightly linked to the existing and dominant trajectory of neoliberal urban strategies, primarily focused on economic competitiveness and the linkages with city branding to attract new private sector interests (MacLeod & Jones, 2011).

Private IT companies and local authorities both play a critical role in planning top-down and centralising approaches of smart urbanism. Governments are looking to the Internet and digital technologies as useful tools in order to provide new services and attempt to enhance old ones. Thus, they are charged with transforming government operations and organizations in order to exploit the new possibilities offered by the intersection between new digital technologies, government services, and city life. Alongside this shift, there has been a growing trend in which local authori-ties in order to define new technical system in city government tend to lead and develop public-private partnerships with a strong emphasis on the expertise and technologies of private sector companies, with the consequence that these private actors are increasingly playing an important part in urban planning and management, in practice developing new models of urbanism (Luque, McFarlane, & Marvin, 2014).

Many contributions have focused on the role of and the struggle between tech giants, such as IBM, Siemens, Cisco and Hewlett Packard, over visibility and legitimacy in the ‘multi-trillion dol-lar smart city global market’ (Townsend, 2013).

Scholars have mostly analysed discursive activ-ity of IT companies aimed at framing how smart cities have to be conceptualized and planned as an important element in the competition over authority and profit in the smart city business, with important consequences in the definition of urban imaginaries and mechanisms of governance (Klauser, 2013; Townsend, 2013). In this critical perspective, smart urbanism is understood as an ideological construct framed by the persuasive discursive activity of a few number of private companies as a means of strengthening their market positions and of staging themselves as central actors of this model of urban governance (Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014).

By the means of a process of reducing differ-ences despite the global distribution and political heterogeneity of client cities (McNeil, 2013), such discourses translate different dimensions of the urban world into a unitary language and inscribe cities in a narrative of positive transformation. In this discursive activity, pervasive and ubiquitous computing and digitally instrumented devices are meant to monitor, manage and synchronize in real time urban flows, infrastructures, and processes. Complex problems are presented as abstracted and objectified facts that can be rationally handled through measurement, quantification, and impres-sive visualizations, with the result that ‘techno-logical solutionism’ (Morozov, 2013) reduces the management of the city in a ‘system thinking’ in a way that reconfigures the idea of the city and of urban citizenship.

The city is envisioned as a physical incar-nation of an immense cloud of big data, func-tioning as a self-regulating organism where regulation and normalisation of body, service and data circulations enable a constant process of optimisation aimed at building a transparent, extendable and adaptable system of systems (Klauser, 2013). The connection, integration and analysis of the information produced by digital tools provide a huge amount of urban data, which can be used to better depict, model

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and predict urban processes; to improve resource efficiency, distribution of services, sustainabil-ity, and urban participation; to reduce the need for traditional governance, and its associated costs; and to stimulate new forms of entrepre-neurship, especially with respect to the service and knowledge economy (Batty, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Miller, 2010).

In the perspective that citizens voluntarily and involuntarily leave digital traces, which, once the datasets are attached to physical space, transform landscapes into new info-scapes, pro-viding citizens with better knowledge of their environment, and allowing them to make more informed decisions (Nabian & Ratti, 2011), these top-down formulations of smart urbanism create normative values of tech-mediated citizenship that prioritize neoliberal efficiency, individual citizen instrumentality, and prescriptive path-ways to civic action. Once people are assumed as human sensors (Goodchild, 2007), sensing nodes (Gabrys, 2014) and/or good-users of the system (Gordon & Walter, in press), urban ‘citi-zenship’ is increasingly articulated through, and delimited to, a series of performances focused on monitoring and managing data, as if it was merely an activity of production and consumption of data and technologies. While IT companies and municipalities being largely responsible for the tools that enable this, smart citizens become responsible for continuing basic city processes and procedures, ‘in service’ to the basic continu-ation of the status quo of the city and its existing power structures.

This top-down approach is driven by a desire for centralised control in order to produce efficiency through technology-led solutions, focused on en-ergy, buildings, infrastructure, mobility and issues of resource use. It promotes a technocratic view of the city and urban development, the corporatisa-tion of civic governance, and the dependence on proprietary software, systems and services that leads to a form of municipal technological lock-in (Kitchin, 2014).

Albeit often advertised as being progressive, this new neoliberal urban experiment tends to reinforce existing power structures and differen-tials, promising radical change while practising business as usual (Karvonen, Evans, & van Heur, 2014). In fact, as corporate discourses prioritize public investments in IT over other domains of spending, smart urbanism seems to represent, in a period of economic crisis and reduced profit from conventional infrastructure, a new higher value circuit of urban investment laid over the top of existing software.

Furthermore, on the one side, smart city model functions as ‘disciplinary strategy’ for admin-istrations and citizens, they both made morally responsible for the achievement of their smart development (Vanolo, 2014). On the other side, in the hand of local political entrepreneurs, it can be used as ‘intellectual technology’ (Ponzini & Rossi, 2010), in support of discursive strategies, seductive imaginaries and the politics of active participation, aimed at propelling new governance institutions, public-private partnerships and policy practices in search of symbolic justifications, and of adequate private and public funds. The smart city script may act as a ‘mobilizing discourse’ (Peck, 2005), and the call to action for smart people and connected communities, indeed, could mask the intent to incorporate innovative forms of cultural and social expression by local policy-makers, real estate investors and hi-tech multinational corporations, in the name of new city agenda, with the gradual marginalization of those actors who do not share the urban leaders’ visions, and the exclusion of alternative models from the public debate (Hollands, 2008).

Discourses of urban development remain prevalently reductionist and elite-driven, as-sembled on a priori non-critical consensus, and aimed at justifying urban hi-tech-led regenera-tion policies as imperatives mostly oriented to economic boosterism. In the meanwhile, issues such as socio-spatial justice and democratic inclu-sion seem to be marginalized, and theoretical and

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operative frameworks suggesting the inevitability of a linear path of development do not offer any space for debating conflicts and alternative paths, with the result that urban issues shift more and more towards the field of what has been defined as a post-political condition, built on the political neutralization of dissent (Swyngedouw, 2009). Here, the right to the city became redefined, in many instances, as the right of the consumer to digitalized urban spaces and producer of urban data rather than the right of the urban inhabitants to the possibilities the urbanized societies have to offer (Mitchell, 2003).

DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND BOTTOM-UP SMART URBANISM

In order to create a critical research agenda on smart urbanism, it seems to be necessary to start from the most important aspects of smart cities, that is the smart citizen (Shepard & Simeti, 2013). The goal is entirely constructive, that is to debate the role of citizens in creating urban culture with technology and in building a smart urbanism that is alternative to dominant IT private power (Hill, 2013).

The debate regarding the progressive inte-gration of digital technologies and urban spaces involves a number of questions relating to the complex processes of transformation – economic, social, political, and environmental – which impact cities. Among these, particular attention is given to the extension of the public sphere in the city (Castells, 1996; Mitchell, 1995). The pervasive diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is having a profound effect upon the mode through which social movements and the diverse forms of active citizenship operate from below as agents of innovation, inclusion and social development (Sassen, 2002).

Within the scope of the ‘augmented’ city, where virtual and physical spaces do not represent two separate dimensions, but parts of a single hybrid

system (Aurigi & De Cindio, 2008), attention is focused on the practices of digital activism (Joyce, 2010). For these practices, which combine social and technological innovation, ICTs do not represent simply an instrument, but a medium, a social construct (Castells, 2007), from which derives the redefinition as much of the meaning and structure of activism as of its relations with the public space and institutional power.

During last years, urban activism has offered several evidence of its smart use of social media, from Occupy Movements and the Arab Spring to the numerous crow-sourced and crow-funding new platforms aimed at engaging smart citizens in the collaborative development of their own city (Luque, McFarlane, & Marvin, 2014). These alternative forms of tech-mediated citizenship are involved in questions of sustainability, at least in terms of triple-bottom-line and beyond (economic, social and environmental), and from them the figure of a new smart citizen seems to be emerg-ing at a far faster rate than that of more formal technology-led smart cities. This smart city needs no marketing campaign, and little in the way of new urban infrastructure. In the growing literature evaluating particular activists’ socio-technical innovations, involving internet-based protest, hacklabs and civic digital platforms, what is really visible are active and engaged citizens, communi-ties and social movements, knitting together their own smart city, albeit not one envisaged by the systems integrators and IT corporations.

The democratisation of access to the interactive potentialities offered by ICTs makes it possible to define a new space-participation model, guided, on the local scale, by single citizens, by local communities and by urban social movements. The advent of ICTs has produced a different way of conducting and exercising the individual and cultural attributes of citizens, as maintained by the self-actualizing citizenship paradigm (Bennett, 2008), emphasising the diffusion of the practices of citizen journalism, micro-activism and individual activism, uncoupled from collective action (Mar-

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ichal, 2013). Online participation also facilitates the birth of new collective mobilisations (Della Porta & Mosca, 2009; Postmes & Brunsting, 2002) and supports new community networks (Gaved & Mulholland, 2008; Wellman, 2001), creating spaces of convergence (Routledge, 2003), which are used to define a particular political agenda and to articulate certain collective visions.

In the urban context, these initiatives nor-mally arise as a reaction to public decisions considered damaging to the local community or the groups belonging to it, or as decisional and organisational practices of the autonomous civil society with respect to formal systems of gover-nance. The participatory impulse is manifested in forms of self-organisation which can operate in manifold directions: through protests, which on the Web acquire ever more often the form of single-issue movements; through channels of counter-information, serving to unmask practices of manipulation by the traditional media, or to arouse public awareness regarding topics of par-ticular interest; or through the re-conversion and social re-valuation of spaces, real and virtual, and of resources, material and immaterial, in order to respond to unsatisfied needs.

For these associative networks, cyberspace becomes a new field of expression, resistance and transformation, a space of democratic participa-tion and political innovation where antagonism is transformed into creative, constructive and pivotal role. From this perspective, cyberspace operates as the site, instrument and object of conflict and participation. In fact, the Web is ever more frequently the site where urban conflicts become visible, a new social space that can be used to challenge powers and to experiment with new reformist politics. In some cases the Web represents an additional option offered to groups and movements that already exist off line and for which ICTs provide new repertoires of action and communication (Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010). Other mobilisations, often born directly online, do not limit themselves to using cyberspace, but

they recognise it as a new vital environment which is itself the subject of social innovation and the object at stake in the dynamics of conflict.

This new kind of digital urbanism is an entirely an informal one, taking root in the crack left by urban planning, city governance and market forces, by the means of incorporation of digital media as one of their most important dimensions. In the dialectical interplay between digital media and physical urban spaces, these new forms of urban activism work concurrently through vari-ous spheres of action in placing a call for change. If physical space is still an important sphere in challenging socio-spatial order and dominant logic of territorial organization (Mitchell, 2003), the virtual sphere is significant in terms of both approaching the remote viewer/supporter and in terms of crafting and spreading the event among participants.

From a pragmatic view, some clear limits and contradictions erupt. First, scholars have pointed out how the use of information technologies cre-ates new inequalities among participants because of social and geographical inequalities in access to and comfort with such technologies, so that technology empowers along some lines of differ-ence while disempowering along others (Leitner, Sheppard, & Sziarto, 2008). Second, the fact that digital activism acts in and through social spaces and digital media, which are produced and operate under the very same logic of neoliberal capitalism, insofar as they are technological products of the industrial mechanisms provided and sustained by venture capital and capitalist investments, dem-onstrates that the triumph of neoliberalism has created an incredibly contradictory landscape for activism, where citizens are capable of resistance to certain neoliberal policies and rhetoric, while still exhibiting and performing as good neoliberal citizens (Long, 2013). Third, such experiences of new civic platforms do not strategically create sys-temic change in the culture of the city for making more sustainable decisions, just as Occupy, Arab Spring and UK riots have not projected any kind

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of suggestion for a new decision-making culture (Hill, 2013). Nonetheless, they might contain the seeds of such a radical change, insofar as these new spaces of everyday mundane sociality can act also as a training ground and a learning space for civic engagement and political participation, offering new terrains of resistance and creation. New platforms for social networking such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have provided hitherto unseen possibilities for distributing and redistributing information on on-going campaigns, expressing political preferences, collaborating with others, and exercising rights.

The physical and the digital are not isolated spheres of action but rather related and connected. Active citizens, communities and urban social movements develop specific forms of multiplicity (Leitner, Sheppard, & Sziarto, 2008) and inter-modality (Lim, 2014), namely the linkages from the Internet and social media to other networks, which enable information and knowledge dis-semination from cyberspace to the physical space of the city. Bodies in online and offline spheres are mutually linked in creating a contemporary public sphere where it’s even possible to galva-nise the resistance to challenge the hegemonic conceptualisation of urban smartness.

URBAN NEOLIBERAL TRANSITION IN SOUTHERN ITALY

This section is aimed at reflecting on the more general trends of urban policy waves during the neoliberal reconfiguration of relationships over urban governing in southern Italy. In fact, through a conceptualisation of neoliberalism as a varie-gated, cumulative and hybrid process that denotes a politically guided intensification of market rule and commodification (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010), an historical analysis of the key moments of neoliberal urban restructuring is necessary to un-derstand its evolutionary pathways. Furthermore, a discussion of the trajectories of this process is

consistent with the strong path-dependent nature of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ insofar it is conceived as a result of the interaction of neoliberal and extra-neoliberal elements, i.e. of neoliberal regulatory restructuring strategies and pre-existing configurations of socio-political power (Brenner & Theodore, 2002): a process that in the economic crisis context is strongly energized by the emergent imaginaries of smart urbanism.

During the early 1990’s, when also Italy moved the first steps towards neoliberal economic and political mode of governance and regulation, the emotional pressure caused by the exacerbation of a mafia-state war and the collapse of older political caste after corruption scandals of ‘Tangentopoli’ accelerated the downscaling of the state through the reform of local government, promoting the birth of a new political season marked by local politics taking a leading role.

During this phase of ‘roll-back neoliberalism’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002), local administrations in southern Italy were increasingly constrained to introduce a new neoliberal approach and principles in local governance, such as managerialization of local administrations, and the new public management, in order to lower the costs of state administrations, and thereby to accelerate inward investment. In the meanwhile, the Europeaniza-tion of urban policy focusing on urban innovation and socio-economic experimentation supported, at once discursively and materially, widespread culture-led initiatives of urban regeneration drawn upon imaginaries of creative and entertainment economy and representations of competitive ur-banism inspired by success examples such as the Barcelona model, and based on forms of public-private partnership, collaborative planning, and negotiated decision-making. Under this adaptation pressure, the experimentation of a multi-level arrangement of governance and of innovative as-semblages of projects, such as Urban I, Territorial pacts, and so on, guided Italian southern cities towards a late and partial post-Fordist transition (Ruggiero, Scrofani, & Ruggiero, 2007), encour-

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aging the planning of culture cities (Carta, 2004). Regeneration policy became the central focus of urban policy and some innovative experiments of creative urbanism were developed through at least a partial integration of physical, symbolic, cultural, intercultural, and hi-tech oriented policies of regeneration, playing a central role in marketing a new image for the cities and for their admin-istrations. It is during this period that in Catania the collaboration between a progressive-oriented local administration, the university and the IT corporation ST Microelectronics supported the birth and development of the Etna Valley, one of the most attractive European high-tech clusters, and the Technological District for Micro and Nano-Systems (Baglieri, Cinici, & Mangematin, 2012) and thanks to its presence on the territory the city started to built an image of milieu innovateur.

The downturn and the consequent interruption of the trajectory of urban regeneration policy arrived at the beginning of twenty-first century, when the shift toward progressive government suffered the consequence of a drastic fall in political consensus. This new cycle was largely characterized by the af-firmation of more conservative and entrepreneurial regimes, while an upsurge in organized crime and frustration at not seeing structural improvements reduced the initial enthusiasm. Such a phase of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) was defined, in particular, by the increasing paralysing political and territorial fragmentation of administrative powers that rendered policy making more difficult, schizophrenic and discontinuous; the return of old-style alignment within policy making process with the reemergence of forms of personalized patronage and clientelism (Som-mella, 2008); together with a strengthening of the revanchist side of urban politics, which empha-sized moral discourses about public order on the streets, calling for a zero-tolerance approach that combined repressive measures against the growing local criminality, the informal economy and the socio-spatial disorder caused by both natives and immigrants (Di Bella, 2010).

As result of a long tradition of exceptional governance in southern Italy, this phase was also marked by the ‘normalization of crisis’ as the breaking event used instrumentally for the justification of urban and territorial strategies (Amato et al., 2011). Through the relations be-tween continuous and contingent crisis, regarding all the key urban questions – such as waste, water, mobility, housing, unemployment, immigration, criminality – and special powers and measures, the ‘exception’ became the basic principle of social, environmental, and policy regulation (Brenner, 2004), often used by traditional powers to confirm and reproduce their legitimacy and therefore, one of the most influential interpretational frameworks of current governance practices in southern cities (Amato et al., 2011). Despite the restrictions of state expenditures and investments, thanks to these special powers local authorities could continue to play the role of main intermediaries between urban economic interests and the central administrations, both at national and regional level, orienting the policy making towards greater entrepreneurialism, in particular by focusing the short- and medium-term aspirations of traditional sectors (builders, property developers and landlords), while more innovative sectors, such as the cultural and the hi-tech, mostly suffered the economic effects of austerity and of global recession as well as the progressive marginalization within urban regeneration policy agendas. Furthermore, the financial breakdown of many southern cities, and Catania among them, had further weakened the role of local administrations in the production of collective goods and urban quality, highlighting the ‘emergency’ character of how the city’s social life and spatial planning were managed.

Under these conditions, also the attempt of launching a strategic urban planning process, aimed to the construction of shared future vi-sions of the area, produced limited outcomes. Notwithstanding its relevance in drawing up an orientation and in delineating the basic values concerning public policies (Zinna, Ruggiero, &

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Grasso, 2003), numerous aspects interfered with its operational effectiveness: the planning tool too ambitiously conceived, the fragility of local leadership, the top-down guidance, the difficult involvement of private capital, and the substantial loss of confidence in local government (Vinci, 2011). Thus, as purely rhetorical statements, it was confined in promoting the development strategies stated by the dominant urban interests, appearing unable to express an effective capac-ity for action (Governa, 2010). Furthermore, a redundant evocation of creative, hi-tech and knowledge economy-oriented urban imaginaries clashed with the ‘dis-regulation’ (Donolo, 2001) that characterized dominant mechanisms of the policy making. On the one hand, particularistic circles of intermediation preserved their power by multiplying the opportunities that allow the mediators to mediate and the political leader-ship maintained influence and control over the processes of territorial transformation through exchange-based relationships, occasionally char-acterized by corruption and the involvement of criminal powers (Cremaschi, 2007). On the other hand, in contrast with such prevailing mechanism of political and social regulation, strategic planning and their visioning processes build on imaginaries of creative and knowledge city performed a signifi-cant symbolic function by making this dynamics less visible and providing political actors with a repertoire of actions rhetorically oriented toward competitiveness (D’Albergo & Moini, 2013).

SOUTHERN CITIES AND SMART URBANISM

Over the recent years of financial and economic crisis, a new urban question arising globally ap-pears even more dramatic in southern Italian cities because of the legacies of previous crisis and of the imperative of cutting public and social spend-ing. In the meanwhile, the complex, confusing and contradictory Italian transition to neoliberalism

had first prevented a coherent process of power decentralization, and then led to dangerous effects on the broader territorial national question. On the one hand, over recent years there was a reverse map of policy priorities in the national agenda, with attention shifting from the problems in the south to those in the north, through rhetoric presenting the latter as the engine of national development and the former responsible of its own decline (Gonzales, 2011). On the other hand, the emer-gency due to the economic crisis is accompanied by the ‘return’ of central power (Perulli, 2013) and used to link the notion of the public good with the repayment of the public debt, while southern cities, in an ever more critical financial crisis, are subjected to coercive pressure to cut public services, rapidly privatize, sell public property, and increase planning deregulation.

The current economic recession, which has hit hard those areas mostly dependent on public support, has led to a further increase in the gap between the north and south in Italy.

Between 2007 and 2012 the gross domestic product of southern Italy decreased by 10% compared to 5,7% in the centre-north; the em-ployment rate decreased by 5,1% in the south, while the centre-north showed an, admittedly poor, increase of 0,1%; more than 400,000 young people between 19 and 35 years of age decided to leave the Italian Mezzogiorno for education or work; at the beginning of 2013, the southern regions per capita income was lower than in Greece; 20% of families were in a situation of poverty and another 30% were extremely vulner-able to poverty (CENSIS, 2013). The economic and social recession as much as the several controversial aspects of EU and national policy, combined with the quality of financial planning and with the economic commitment that the state had guaranteed in support of southern Italy (SVIMEZ, 2012), caused a further deterioration of territorial competitiveness and of urban quality, with strongly negative demographic, employment and educational effects (CENSIS, 2013).

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Over the last few years, two different plans have reinvigorated the debate on the regeneration of southern Italian cities: ‘Plan for cities’ and ‘Growth decree’. In 2012, the Italian Minister of Infrastructure launched the national ‘Plan for cities’, a programme aimed at the regeneration of deprived urban areas that should result in the provision of new infrastructures, urban redevelopment, and the building of car parks, homes and schools. In January of 2013, there was the selection of 28 projects, 11 in southern cities, from 457 proposals of local governments.1 The ‘Growth decree’, in line with the European policy agenda Horizon 2020, is centred on smart city vi-sion, by now also in Italy as a priority instrument of urban regeneration. The smart city programme had launched two calls for tender in southern regions: ‘Smart and City Communities’ and ‘Social Innova-tion’, first reserved only for southern Italian cities. The first is part of a more comprehensive general programme ‘Italian digital Agenda’ and has allo-cated 200 million euro for the partial financing of 38 ‘high-tech-oriented experimental projects’ aimed at mobility and logistics, healthcare, education, e-government through cloud computing solutions, environmental sustainability and energy efficiency, tourism and culture. Thanks to social innovation programme, another 58 projects by young people resident in the southern regions have been selected for access to financing of an additional euros 40 million euro by the European Fund for Regional Development 2007-2013.2 These two programmes have been followed by the launch of a further two: one for ‘smart cities and communities’ in northern regions with a funding of 700 million euro, and one hi-tech national clusters of 408 million euro (40 mil-lion aimed at southern regions, 368 million at the rest of Italy). All the southern cities engaged in submit-ting their proposals, such as Naples, Palermo, Bari, Syracuse, and Catania have created public-private partnerships, in form of associations, composed by public, semi-public and private actors, think tanks, universities, IT companies, and especially big players that changes the geometries of power inside urban governance arrangements.

Actually, the administration of Catania is en-gaged in the implementation of three smart city projects funded by the MIUR (Ministry of Educa-tion, University and Research) and private com-panies, enthusiastically advertised as a strategic way of giving new impetus to the depressed Etna Valley district. PRISMA is an industrial research project, which involves the Public Administrations of Regions and Cities of Southern Italy (Apulia Region, ARES Puglia, District of Catania), Indus-tries, Italian Universities and Research Institutes. It is aimed at building and implementing a cloud platform for public administrations, enterprises, citizens and communities, using E-Government, e-Health, and e-Seismic as main fields of experi-mentation. In this project, the city of Catania is committed to provide context for the pilot test-ing of some innovative application solutions for e-government process re-engineering of Local Public Administration (LPA), aimed at measuring the internal (efficiency) and external (perceived) performances of administrations. These solutions will be implemented by adopting the paradigm of cloud computing, and the testing of application solutions will cover the area of mobility, urban decorum and human services, through the involve-ment of citizens in the evaluation of the quality of services. A second project, named ‘DiCet, il Miglio Rosso, LivingLab of Culture and Technol-ogy’, involves also CNR, University of Salento and other IT private companies, and is aimed at strengthening touristic attractiveness of the city, with a special attention to cultural and historical heritage. A third project, called SINERGRID – Smart Intelligent Energy Community Grid, is developed in the field of renewable energy and smart grid through the collaboration of ENEA (National Agency for new Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development), Uni-versity of Catania and other private IT companies.

While awaiting an evaluation of context-specific impacts produced by the implementation of these urban experiments, some limits and risks appear easy to predict. First, justified doubts

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chiefly regard the ability of local government to plan and execute such projects, insofar as it has the task of activating participatory procedures between the public and private companies, of proposing planning tools able to connect spatial requalification with wider public interest goals, and of making technical offices and skills available in support of implementing actors (Nam & Pardo, 2011). Second, there is the evident fragmentation of the proposed interventions.

Although the call for an integrated approach to urban development is currently the most widespread in scientific literature, institutional initiatives still appear to be characterized by a sec-torial approach. This difficulty of translating the theoretical most emphasized integrated approach into practice is symbolized by the re-production of smart city benchmarking analysis (Vanolo, 2014), such as I-City Rate report (FORUMPA, 2012), which represents, in a hi-tech perspective, the historical disparities between northern and southern Italian cities (Gonzales, 2011). The use of a set of multiple statistical indicators reinforces a sectorial vision and reduces the complex urban dynamic and its smartness to assessable and enumerable units, in order to produce new and specific ways to organize problems and prefigure solutions. Furthermore, the rating analysis, as a ‘performance technology’, implicitly indicates the obligation of southern cities, most of them in the lower side of the rating, to become more similar to northern cities, and indeed to redefine their problems and priorities, and to reorganize their agendas, according to the smart city imaginary (Vanolo, 2014). While Italian southern cities face much more traditional urban problems, such as housing closures, criminality, poverty and homelessness, lack of public services and mas-sive degradation of the historical built environ-ment, they are reformulating their problems and reorganizing their agendas according to the smart city discourse, furthermore without proper criti-cal debate between different ideas and positions.

Third, also because of the difficulties at state level in implementing the much-trumpeted Ital-ian digital agenda, at the moment the politics of smart city appears no more than a new form of ‘managerial localism’, based on the distri-bution of reduced financial resources through territorial competition (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) and on the redefinition of smartness at the local level as relational resource in the politics of active participation through the devolution of its governance to public-private macro-actors (Ponzini & Rossi, 2010). On the one hand, during the deepening phase of neoliberalization, the reconfiguration of the responsibilities to reduce the gap between the north and the south of Italy increasingly means a ‘downward’ disciplinary imposition of regula-tory experiments and of ‘competitive forms of policy transfer’ (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010). On the other hand, the politics of smart city is reconfiguring in a completely new way the balance of power inside urban governance arrangements and institutions between public and private, and local and global, actors.

Despite of progressive potential, the smart city model runs the risk to be used by new urban governance arrangements exclusively for stimu-lating hi-tech market and local boosterism or as the instrumental channel for obtaining funds and public legitimation at the local level, instead of as a means by which to image new solutions for structural problems that continue to affect southern cities today.

At the moment the smart paradigm seems to have taken the form of a ‘discursive project’ (Ponzini & Rossi, 2010), which offers seductive imaginaries and visions of urban regeneration, without any guarantee of a parallel strong public commitment directed at meeting the bottom up demand for a real change and progress, at expanding social opportunities, or at shrinking historical gap between the north and the south in Italy.

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COUNTER-GEOGRAPHIES OF SMART URBANISM

In the meanwhile, alternative geographies of digital urbanism emerge from below even in southern cities, such as Catania, as a result of discursive and practical activities of citizens, communities and social movements, which are autonomously committed to create social in-novation and urban quality, and to reduce the distance between the ever more problematic social peripheries and the wider metropolitan reality which, over the last decades, has estab-lished itself in an unplanned and chaotic manner (Di Bella, 2012a).

These bottom-up digital organizational ex-periments are courageous but inevitably fragile initiatives covering a wide spectrum, ranging from those characterised by an orientation which is confrontational and antagonistic toward institu-tional activities, through to the more collaborative, oriented towards the citizenry, institutions and forms of urban government.

They include, among the others, the antago-nistic practices of social centres, citizens groups committed to creating laboratories of active citizenship, associations operating in the social peripheries, and epistemic communities unit-ing a sense of belonging, artistic expression and social denunciation, in a way which is totally autonomous with respect to the mechanisms and formal channels of urban governance and plan-ning. These practices of active urbanism combine the offer of digital and social services and sup-port to the weaker members of the population, the heterogeneous demands regarding the rights to the city, an increased socio-political capacity of the communities involved, and the social re-appropriation of both urban and virtual spaces (Di Bella, 2012b).

In particular, three different typologies of space for civic engagement on the Web are apparent: cyberspace of resistance, cyberspace of differ-ence, and cyberspace of civic networks (Table 1).

A first field of collective action analysed is that linked to the Italian traditional practices of urban struggle by the social centres (Mudu, 2004). The experience of Experia, the first Sicilian case of occupation, began in 1988 on the initiative of a group belonging to the radical members of the Revolutionary Communists, in an abandoned cinema in the working-class quarter of Antico Corso, a social periphery of the historic centre of Catania and one in which the Mafia exercises considerable control. Over the course of its history Experia has been subjected to several criminal attacks, has been the main actor in innumerable molecular civil wars (De Souza, 2009), and has become one of the symbols of the struggle and resistance of Catania’s social centres against the violence of extreme right wing activists and local criminals.

The mobilisation of the activists of the centre resulted in a composite set of activities, which can be classified as those of production, contestation and claim. Production prevalently concerned pro-viding services to the quarter as well as adopting individuals and families in particularly difficult circumstances. The Experia also operated as an agency of contestation and social inquiry, develop-ing activities denouncing the actions of organised crime, the institutional responsibilities for the state of urban decay of the Antico Corso and Purità quarters, and the negative effects produced by the progressive settlement of the area around the University Hub.3 Despite substantial social commitment, the social centre, which had over the years been subjected to various repressions on the part of the forces of law and order, was definitively evicted in October 2009. In contrast to the negation of a space in the real city, the Web (http://www.cpoexperia.it/; http://www.senzapa-droni.org/) offers a space of resistance, cultural and structural: a virtual survival shelter. Through a new repertoire of digital actions,4 activists re-inforce actions opposing the eviction and present to a wider public an identity contradicting that of ‘deviant’ offered by politicians. In this way it has

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been able to acquire visibility and create consen-sus regarding its own activities and the territorial questions it raised, even in the traditional media.

Contrasting with the Experia, the story of FreakNet MediaLab (http://www.freaknet.org/hacklab) is linked directly to experiments in hacktivism. In this case the progressive refusal of urban spaces promotes a social reinterpretation of technology as an instrument of emancipation – spatial, social and cultural – and diffusion of the hacker culture. For the pioneer hacktivists the Web is, in itself, the object of conflict, a space of contestation and innovation, to be used to contrast the unregulated globalisation of markets and capital with the globalisation of rights and tech-nological opportunities according to the principle of self-government. MediaLab began in 1994 as the first Italian hacklab on the Auro premises, the self-governed social centre occupying a historic building close to Catania Cathedral. The story of

Auro and MediaLab is firmly tied to the themes of information and communication: even the build-ing occupied is the former printing works of ‘La Sicilia’ newspaper. While the activities of Auro allowed a complete restructuring of the building, the hacktivists developed a close collaboration with the historic anti-Mafia magazine ‘I Siciliani’, edited by Fava, a journalist assassinated by the Mafia, creating a web version of the magazine and setting up CyberRadio, the first Italian radio station entirely on line. Freaknet MediaLab, which in 2001 hosted Hackmeeting, an international gathering of creative hackers, offered various information services and, as a result of the recov-ery, conservation and digitalisation of the historic newspaper library, was able to preserve the unique, complete collection of the city’s news from the end of fascism to the 1970s. 5 Following the numer-ous evictions suffered by Auro and some internal disputes, FreakNet MediaLab first moved to the

Table 1. Characteristics of the three types of active urbanism

Activism of Resistance Activism of Difference Activism of CivicNets

Orientation to Urban Governance

Controversial and exclusively oriented to social practices Mixed

Persuasive and oriented to institutions and to modalities of urban governance

Frames Equity and social justice

Urban democracy and participation of minorities and of marginalized and alternative social groups

Creativity and arts as vehicles of civic control, re-appropriation and spatial re-qualification

Issues at stake in conflicts and in social innovation processes

Distribution of goods and resources

Recognition and naming of resources to allocate

Different regulation of allocation criteria

Action repertoires in real space

Social denouncing; social services agency; youth cultural centre; insurgent planning

Territorial animation; intercultural mediation; multicultural spaces socialization; denouncing of discriminatory practices

Citizenry laboratory; recovery of abandoned spaces; social art practices; lobbying

Action repertoires in cyberspace

E-journalism; counter manifestation; sabotage; mail bombing; protest; petitioning; creative hacking

Identity negotiation, formation and presentation; civic engagement; watchdog organization

Communication; consultation; skill sharing; petitioning; socio-spatial empowerment

Smart city co-creation

Hacking the urban space; deciphering urban reality; making technologies and urban data more visible and transparent

Pluralizing the authorship of urban data coding

Fostering new engagement with the urban environment; promoting direct contact and association; taking virtual community out of the wires and onto the streets

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Arci offices and, after the eviction of the latter in 2008, is currently without headquarters in the city. Despite this, the Freaknet/Poetry/Dyne.org circuit continues to receive international recognition for its experimental initiatives regarding the exploita-tion of and creative potential inherent in ICTs.6 It is one of the websites registered by UNESCO and it collaborates, at the international and local level, with diverse realities of civic society, with academic institutions, and with other hacklabs.

Among them, HackspaceCatania is a no-profit organization, which acts since 2013 as a commu-nity lab of digital creative young people, engaged in activities of learning and sharing knowledge about the hacker culture, as well as in hosting and developing autonomous projects, most of them aimed at integrating technological, artistic and social innovation.

New collective actions are frequently concerned with the creation of symbolic values and cultural conflicts. This category of cyberspace of difference includes both actors engaged under different titles in promoting the rights of specific typologies of citizens, and with them a call for a city which is user-friendly and/or tolerant, and those groups committed to pro-pose the adoption of alternative lifestyles, bearers of demands for a city which is liveable. The first group includes the associative realities fighting for the recognition of diversity, whether social, cultural, sexual or ethnic, as a prerequisite and stimulus for the development of a city open to the world, to in-novation and to creativity. The obligation to practice politics of difference is married to the construction of the idea of a new urban citizenry sensitive to the themes of social justice, cultural pluralism and civic commitment, and to the progressive extension of the spaces of democracy and participation (Di Bella, 2011).7 The second group is made up of those civic experiences adopted for the recovery of artistic cre-ativity and a symbolic relationship between citizen and environment – social and natural – indicating a different and alternative path toward individual and collective well-being, civic sense, architectural beauty, aesthetic taste, and shared rights and duties.8

For both groups, the showcase of cyberspace allows, in the first place, to express one’s own being, the positive attributes of one’s identity and the values which one upholds. In this perspective, besides the public demand for neglected needs and expectations, the significance of one’s pres-ence online is linked to a continuous operation of interrogation on the state of one’s own identity. The affirmation of the positive value of one’s own being takes specific forms in relation to the group of which one is a member and to the symbolic resources which are the subject of dispute: for gay groups, the presentation of self plays on the dichotomy ‘normality’ vs. ‘deviance’; in the case of ethnic groups, above all second generation, that of ‘existence’ vs. ‘origin’; in groups committed to environmental, ecological and ethical challenges that of ‘quality’ vs. ‘non-sustainability’, ‘beautiful’ vs. ‘ugly’. However, the online presence makes it possible not only to express oneself and tell one’s story, but also to check on others. In this sense, the Web assumes the value of a space of surveil-lance (watchdog organization) and of possible complaint against practices and activities that could compromise the collective interests of the group or what is perceived as the common good.

The examples emerging from an analysis of the Web and the practices performed by new ‘netizens’ (Brettel, 2008) demonstrate a greater activism; one which is no longer prevalently de-mand led, but is constructive in nature. Further, most of the initiatives are not directed exclusively at the community to which one belongs, but at social aggregates and flexible territories. The vindication of an active role through ICTs can involve the desire to maintain and strengthen transnational bonds (Panagakos & Horst, 2006), to contribute to the construction of entire societ-ies that are ‘diversely national’ (Andall, 2002) or to act as an instrument of socialisation to urban places and spaces, an invitation to fully inhabit the city despite resistance and closures.9 In any case, cyberspace allows the aggregation and definition of new identities, the emergence of new social

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and political subjects who, even though endowed with limited resources, attain a level of visibility which territorial presence alone could not guar-antee, even to the point of being recognised by political institutions as qualified spokespersons. Shared demands and sensibilities form the nucleus of diverse typologies of civic networks. These can be distinguished on the basis of the specific definition of the territorial contexts of reference, with corresponding diverse uses of the spaces of virtual participation.

Gruppo Azione Risveglio (GAR), formed in 2009 (https://www.facebook.com/azioneris-vegliog) as the action group of the movement 40xCatania, has transformed into a true and proper civic network which has the support of a thousand members and which acts to bridge the real and virtual spheres, organising initiatives for the civic re-appropriation of abandoned spaces and for social condemnation of the city’s many open wounds.

These strategies are often linked to the realisa-tion of civic events where practices of social arts become instruments of a new creative citizenry who adopt places and territories, shifting attention from a given problem to that of the resources to be liberated and revaluated. 10

GAR acts mainly with the objective of prompt-ing the city administration, businessmen and the private sector to construct beauty and liveability, and of encouraging citizens to stimulate and ac-company from below the new processes of territo-rial transformation, through a renewed awareness and responsibility of their role as controllers.

While activists use listserv, blogs, cell-phones, and social networking sites to organize and ad-vertise their events and engage more citizens in urban participation, the virtual notice board, a true and unique assembly space, becomes the primary opportunity for contact between artists, activists and citizens, a crucial space for the elaboration of a new shared language and vocabulary within which single activists can present and make avail-able to the group their particular competencies and

talents. The Web functions as a proving ground for initiatives undertaken. Virtual civic participa-tion announces opposition to public administra-tion decision-making, indicates the link between specific problems and the dominant logic, and through virtual and material actions illustrates possible alternative models. The Web also acts as a sounding board for events and the results produced, but above all it is a place of contact and conflict between spatial visions and reconstruc-tions of policy processes, a site for the complex elaboration of cognitive frames, and a place for the presentation of different interests, perceptions and knowledge, both technical and broad.

A different typology of virtual network of local associative groups is that created at the level of city quarter. In the Catania environment, an experience focusing on the nature of more evolved neigh-nets (Doheni-Farina, 1996) is the ‘Piattaforma per Librino’. Librino, the quarter conceived by Kenzo Tange, is today the object of diverse projections and visions of the urban space and citizenship. More than a non-place, Librino appears to be a hyper-connoted place, as much through those depictions that portray it in exasper-ated terms, a frontier territory, separated spatially and socially from the rest of the city and marked by an organised incivility, as in opposite terms, a place to be understood positively, highlighting the traits of ‘beauty’, liveability and belonging. Within it one observes the presence of a certain collective vivacity, expressions more of private society than of public administration.

Although highly heterogeneous, these actors understand the necessity to move and operate in network in order to ensure capability. In 2008, the budding network of local associations created a shared document of analyses and proposals for launching the spatial and social re-qualification of the quarter. 11 This was intended as the starting point for the construction of a site of participated design and active citizenship in Librino. With respect to this initiative, the use of the Web plays an influential role in the exchange of knowledge

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and skills, facilitating contact between associations and reducing the distance between the actions of diverse components operating in the social sphere. All the groups adapted their services to the 2.0 World and Internet was recognised as an essential instrument to stimulate an awareness of quarter in the local population and to heighten the social impact of their civic initiatives.12

Another typology of civic network is that which forms around the dynamics impacting on a single urban public space. The Committee ‘Amici della Villa Bellini’ is an epistemic virtual community which transformed the city’s most important urban park, and its contested process of requalification, in a laboratory of active citizenship. Internet provided the activists of the committee an ideal environment to meet and interact, to share expe-riences, languages and knowledge, developing a continuous process of e-learning and civic com-mitment. This called for an ensemble of activities regarding communication, animation, consultation and empowerment, structured around some ter-ritorial issues and able to revalue the Villa and diverse local skills and knowledge both inside and outside the group. The group meets only on the Web through two blogs (http://villabellini.wordpress.com; http://www.facebook.com/pages/Amici-della-Villa-Bellini/), which have become both a place of contact/conflict between activ-ists and a platform from which to launch all the initiatives of the committee. In the first phase, this process included a set of communication and consultation activities working on the construction of a biography of the Villa. Revaluing the park’s historic legacy, it was possible to establish con-nections between experiences, the mental maps of the inhabitants and the collective narrative, promoting a participated and creative reading of their aspirations and culminated in revealing the ‘contradictions of the space’ (Lefebvre, 1976) and of the process of re-qualification. The patrimony of knowledge and competence was subsequently activated within animation projects, which in-cluded the organisation of diverse public events

at the Villa, centred on themes of urban democ-racy, safety and decorum, of sports, infancy and multi-culturalism. Other events concerned more the sphere of cultural, social, political, commer-cial, and formative empowerment of the activists, citizens and associations concerned, in turn, with the initiatives undertaken. As well as developing an intense debate on the management of the city’s public spaces and green areas, the final objective of the committee is the elaboration of a plan of self-management of the park which anticipates the input of private capital and broad competen-cies able to guarantee sustainable services and the democratic re-appropriation from below of Catania’s most important urban garden.

The exploration of these experiences of virtual active citizenship shows how, in a reality char-acterised by a weak civic tradition, ICTs can act as devices potentiating civil society (Leontidou, 2010). In these situations, cyberspace offers a new social space, which supports participation from below of all those actors who cannot take advantage of the structure of political opportunity to gain access to the decision-making processes of urban politics. The fruitful, heterogeneous modalities of using the Web confirm not only the democratic potentials inherent in the technologi-cal instrument, but also the widespread desire for participation on the part of citizens. Despite the great variety of political affiliations, ideological perspectives, available resources, explicit needs and solutions offered, through manifold prac-tices of the social reuse of spaces, competencies and technologies, these modalities create a tight network of mobilisations which offer themselves as potential institutional interlocutors for the conception, design and implementation of new urban social and spatial planning.

The ways in which the Web and other digital tools can be used, in most cases spontaneously and without the support of specific technologi-cal competencies, have further highlighted the experimental character of these initiatives, with all the unknowns that this entails. And yet, cy-

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berspace is recognised as the ideal instrument for the reinforcement of collective identity, social life and the creative solution of urban problems. The Web becomes the ineluctable route for an offer of complete and independent communication, for the development of a social journalism and investigation free of partisan interests, and for their politics of knowledge (Leach & Scoones, 2007). Further, the building blocks of computer technology offer mechanisms for the reordering and stratification of knowledge, as well as the discovery and elaboration of a shared memory, which conventional information media cannot provide.

These new collective actors have a direct impact on the organization of urban space, but thanks to the continuous use of ICT they learn to interact not just in a local contest, but even in a multi-scale, getting in touch with movements, organization and institutions that operate on different local, national and international scale (Sassen, 2002). In more disadvantaged quarters of the city, where organised crime continues to exercise direct control over territory, civic com-mitment is often conditioned by mounting fear. In this environment, the recourse to cyberspace can allow activists to confront the violence that rules the city’s physical space, countering de-sertification with innovative social forces and offering an instrument of social emancipation to the local population.

On the Web, urban movements, spontaneous citizens’ committees and groups find the oppor-tunity to put themselves in the game, to become acquainted with the mechanisms, difficulties and potentials inherent in those practices of democratic participation denied by the decisional processes of city politics. In the cases examined above, the Web also mitigates the impoverishment of knowledge and competence resulting from the brain drain phenomenon, opening spaces for dialogue, creative listening and the exchange of knowledge and experience which can include even those who, while having had to emigrate,

are still able to offer an important contribution to the challenges faced by their city: this is for example the main goal of a virtual community project called ‘terroni 2.0’.

Compared to the scale of conventional urban relations that are largely determined by market forces and power structures, a plurality of voices, albeit as part of a fragmented landscape of alter-native practices, is unwittingly and collectively engaged in reframing the debate on smart urban-ism. For these autonomous practices of urban and digital activism, technology is not necessarily the most critical factor for smartening a city. They experiment a bottom-up understanding of what a smart city could be, which is alternative to that advertised by powerful private companies with their orientation to individual citizen instrumen-tality, centralisation of control, and efficiency, as they rather encourage decentralisation of control, collective action, as well as some form of chaos and randomness.

Nonetheless, relying solely on bottom-up processes also appears problematic, unlikely or even infeasible. Although the examples of tactical and digital urbanism discussed above had in some cases impact and effected some change in decision-making processes, they seem to be unable to modify and correct the culture of the city, so that thinking and planning the city of the future cannot only place all responsibil-ity for its success with citizens. What appears necessary is a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches, through which to estab-lish the smart city of the future as a platform of social learning and collective intelligence of all affected stakeholders (Breneur, Walravens, & Ballon, 2014). It may act as a medium, as long as it does not put technology in the driving seat, which might be very useful in terms of introducing genuine efficacy and verve into the way the public sector works, reducing the cost of government massively whilst increasing its positive impact, rebuilding a meaningful civic interface with citizens.

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DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Despite cities have also become central to pro-test movements in the post-bubble era, and the ‘We are 99%’ slogan of Occupy Movements that erupted all around the world symbolizes the protest against the growth of income inequality, government’s bailout of banks, and the effects of austerity policies, there is no evidence of a rethinking of urban development model (Ooster-lyinck & Gonzales, 2013). On the contrary, the global crisis started to work more as an enabler of another wave of the politics of experimenta-tion aimed at the constant restructuring of urban neoliberalization, rather than as an opportunity for progressive post-neoliberal urban transformations (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2012).

Albeit often advertised as being progressive, this new wave of neoliberal urban experimentation in reality tends to reinforce existing power struc-tures and differentials, with the result that urban experiments on the whole exhibit the paradoxical qualities of promising radical change while practis-ing business as usual. In this perspective, smart city model does not seem to be an exception, since it is primarily focused on economic competitiveness and the linkages with city branding to attract new private sector interests. Although wider questions of environmental degradation, social innovation and democratic participation may be part of this discourse, the focus is primarily on the economic, and especially the potential for innovation and new opportunities associated with technology market and green growth.

Furthermore, as Saskia Sassen (2012) has noted, there is a further tendency to make these technologies invisible, and hence put them in command rather than in dialogue with users, so that the centralising tendencies of urban control systems might be counter-productive becoming a producer of passive citizens, as citizens increas-ingly devolve their decision-making and responsi-bility to software. In fact, once these sensors, tags and processors increasingly function passively,

that is via delegation, there is a risk of delegating whole sets of decisions and, along with that, the ethics and politics of those decisions, to invisible and sentient systems (Crang & Graham, 2007).

Nonetheless, cyberspace acts also as a new social space where insurgent politics and social movements are increasingly able to intervene more decisively in the new communication space, the effects of which are to render these technologies more visible, to offer the possibility of enriched community formation, and then to re-define rela-tions of powers.

The examples of digital activism discussed above, in the forms of cyberspace of resistance, of difference, and of civic networks, demonstrate how ICTs have provided new instruments in sup-port of social demands rising from below. Internet facilitates the traditional off line collective actions in terms of organisation and mobilisation and cre-ates new ones that develop directly online. The relationship between online and offline actions is now clearly one of interdependence: actions which involve objectives of digital democracy often finish by invading real spaces of the city, while traditional practices of protest employ the technological op-portunities presented by cyberspace in a natural manner. This offers new possibilities to act: from the actions largely persuasive, oriented either to citi-zens and institutions and to the innovation of urban governance, as in the case of the civic networks, to the more aggressive, more or less exclusively ori-ented towards social practices, self-determination and self-organization and moved by the logic of conflict, as in the cyberspace of resistance and partially in the cyberspace of difference.

The intricate urban and digital spatiality of these insurgencies brings a demand for democracy, and links it to equity in distribution of urban resources and social inclusion issues. These grassroots trans-formations of spatial, material, and social aspects of a city act as ‘urban co-creation’ in deciphering urban reality, increasing public participation of urban improvement, and re-imagining different ver-sions of the future city (Dork & Monteyne, 2011).

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In the cyberspace of resistance, social per-formances of hacktivism are mostly engaged in developing technologies autonomously, in order to make them more visible and the data coding of the environment more transparent. While seek-ing to pluralise the authorship of this coding, the experiences of difference activism define themselves around urban democracy values, linking these to the necessity of recognising minorities and alternative life styles, and to the issues of new urban citizenship and intercultural cohabitation. Besides denouncing the distance between political leaders and citizens and the top-down planning practices, the particularity of civic-nets is the fact they are centred on the social value of culture and expressivity. In so doing, they seek to foster new engagements with the environment by promoting new practices of direct contact and association, taking virtual community out of the wires and onto the streets (Crang & Graham, 2007). There are increasingly widespread calls to try to realise and reclaim the potentials of augmented spaces through art and activism. Some artistic endeavours provide a different or pluralised encoding of urban space, while others attempt to record and give voice to the myriad of invisible histories and myths of places in their attempts to overcode the present city with memories of the past, such as Amici Villa Bellini.

Cyberspace stands out as a new territory for demanding the right to the city on the part of aug-mented civic communities, the bearers of needs, ambitions and demands which occupy diverse urban environments, involving quarters in crisis, public spaces with high symbolic value and the urban public sphere. As discussed above, limits and contradictions of such experiences are clear too, and yet, they might contain the seeds of a radical change in city culture.

These new collective actors develop dis-courses and practices that challenge the norma-tive values of tech-mediated citizenship based on neoliberal efficiency, individual citizen

instrumentality, and prescriptive pathways to civic action, while broadening the horizon of public action. They directly call for institutions to undertake a profound revision of urban govern-ment, while also demanding the right to have a socially oriented and human-centred intelligent and smart city.

Taking in consideration that the challenge with smart cities, just as with most aspects of cities, is in various cultures of decision-making and that without an innovative local society it is not possible to have a real smart city, local administrations have to develop an active form of governance, in a symbiotic relationship with this alternative practices of active and digital urbanism, in order to build urban technologi-cal design on a perception of smartness that includes the conflicts inherent to the different collective urban cultures and experiences. This might look to conceive citizens not only as users and functional actors in a prescribed framework but active participants in the production of such framework, as well as these practices of active urbanism as strategic rather than simply tacti-cal for a wider systemic change. This is akin to horizontalising what is now vertical, imposed by top-down authority and expertise (Sassen, 2012). In particular, local institutions have to reposition politics, as public realm, as the place where critical discourses and alternative imagi-naries of smart city can deconstruct hegemonic rationalities, unmask the myths and reifications that pervade neoliberal prescriptions of urban innovation, reclamation and reconfiguration, and to then reconstruct determination of public needs and planning priorities.

Scholars who are engaged in formulating a critical research agenda on smart urbanism, for its part, have to focus on such emergence of competing geographies of smart city, as a key point for the comprehension of how urban actors manage and struggle over the local impacts of global flows of planning ideas and models.

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Big Data: A term used to describe the expo-nential growth and availability of data produced automatically, routinely, and by various forms of sensing technologies. An accurate analysis of such big amount of data may lead to more confident decision making, in urban governance and beyond.

Cognitive Capitalism: The new frontier of capitalist expansion defined by the central role of digital technologies of computing and communica-tion and by the intensifying role of knowledge in the commodity production system at large.

Digital Activism: The use of new communica-tion and information technologies, such as Internet technologies, social media, smart phones and other digital devices for various forms of activism to enable faster and wider communication by social movements, communities and citizens.

Policy Transfer: The process in which knowl-edge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and planning ideas and practices travels and is transferred to different contexts.

Post-Political Condition: It refers to the cri-tique of the emergence of a politics of consensus on a global scale based on the acceptance of the capitalist market and the liberal state as the or-ganisational foundations of society.

Social Innovation: The creation, development and adoption of new concepts, ideas, practices and strategies aimed at resolving existing social, cultural, economic, and environmental challenges.

Urban Neoliberalization: The process of regulatory restructuring characterized by a politi-cally guided intensification of market rule and commodification and the translation of the logic of free market capitalism into the urban domain of socio-spatial relations.

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ENDNOTES

1 The list of selected projects is available on line http://www.ediliziaeterritorio.ilso-le24ore.com/pdf2010/Edilizia_e_Territo-rio/_Allegati/Free/Citta/2012/12/Schede.pdf.

2 The list of selected projects is available on line (http://www.ponrec.it/media/91513/elenco_progetti_di_innovazione_sociale_approvati.pdf).

3 The University’s investments in real estate have, in fact, activated a process of “studen-tification” leading to a sharp rise in rental costs and the number of evictions and has produced a progressive modification in the area’s population, largely expelling the original inhabitants. Also thanks to the influence exercised in the formation of the Antico Corso Residents’ Committee, Expe-ria, through its campaign of active protest and the wide spectrum of alternative solu-tions proposed, were created the conditions necessary for broadening the network of policy decision-making. The social centre lays claim, in particular, to a guiding role in denouncing the strategy of speculation in real estate as a lever for urban regeneration and the risks connected with the gentrification factory initiated by the University.

4 Online petitions and the email bombing of protest “targets”, the production and shar-ing of social inquiries, articles, messages, videos and events. Between February and June 2010, mayor Stancanelli’s coalition organised the stati generali (general states), a series of meetings held between experts and stakeholders to consider the city and its future. In response, Experia organised an online (www.riprendiamocicatania.it) counter manifestation disaSTrATI generali (general disasters), with inquiries into the state of decay in Catania’s social peripher-ies, distributing informative material and

promoting cultural, social and civil initia-tives undertaken in collaboration with other contributory associations.

5 In particular, the recovery and recycling of discarded computers, computer courses for Italians and immigrants, programmes for surfing and writing in Arabic, the offer of free email accounts and campaigns for the circulation of free software.

6 Among the initiatives promoted by the computer technology laboratory, of par-ticular interest are: “Netsukuku”, a pure network project, i.e. a system of peer-to-peer routing which can be used to construct an anonymous and anarchic world wide web, separate from Internet and without the sup-port of any server, ISP or central authority. For this project, the cover of the February 2010 issue of “Wired Italia” magazine was dedicated to a young mathematician and MediaLab activist hacker from Catania; “NetEcology”, a techno-ecological village integrating electronic, technological and ecological knowledge, which hosts study programmes and projects regarding organic agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and architectural and construction projects; “Museum of Informatics”, a collection of his-toric computers, restored with their original operating systems, programmes and support media.

7 In the Catania context, they have identified in the Web a virtual laboratory in which it is possible to experiment diversity in real-ity action, such as Città Felice, a bastion of feminism in the Etna area, ArciGay and Open Mind, pro-gay and lesbian associations, the Catania cell of Rete G2 (The Second Genera-tion Network)), ethnic community associa-tions, such as Mauritiansocietycatania.com, and many other groups which play an active role in the processes of social and political integration of immigrants.

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8 Of the numerous associations, it is worth drawing attention to Catania G.A.S. (gruppo acquisto solidale, Fair Trade Group), the Catania cells of Guerrilla Gardening and Critical Mass, the Dance Attack collective, the committee Rifiuti Zero Catania (Zero Waste) and the centre G.A.P.A. (giovani as-solutamente per agire, or Youth Absolutely For Action), besides a consistent presence of initiatives of micro-activism and single-issue mobilizations. Others alternative practices of tech-mediated citizenship make use and/or create new platforms for complaining, such as the Facebook communities “de-gradocatanese”, “guardiamoci intorno”, “riprendiamoci catania”, or for denouncing urban disorder and decay: #spaziozeroct, for example, is an initiative organized in 2012 by some architects in collaboration with the community of Instragramers of Catania, which invited members of commu-nity and common citizens to take a picture of, and then to share it on line, the denied and decayed spaces of the city, in order to commonly evaluate which of them could be autonomously and creatively re-functioned in order to satisfy social needs of inhabitants.

9 Over recent years, the association Ashram Multikulti Catania (http://www.multikul-ticatania.it) has created various initiatives relating to the territory, such as those pro-moting the adoption from below of the city’s Civita quarter, one of the urban areas most affected by processes of ethnic residential settlement, as well as home to several mosques. Through laboratory activities and collaboration with the voluntary sphere, the association intends to develop practices of dialogue and creative listening within the territory and the many cultures inhabit-ing it, stimulating, above all, the young to recognise that confronting diversity is an instrument which can be used to improve urban quality.

10 Mannequins portraying disinterested citi-zenry crowd the scene of the civil initiative organised to protest against the wound produced by the gutting of Piazza Europa; installations of papier-mâché cigarettes mutate the many, waterless, fountains of the historic centre into huge ashtrays; gigantic eyes suspended in the air symbolise renewed civil control and survey the social construc-tion site of urban transformation “C’era una volta San Berillo” (Once upon a time San Berillo); hundreds of drums animate the parade intended to announce the social re-appropriation/legal occupation of one of the spaces denied to the city, the Palazzo della Musica; The Church of San Francisco, in the Cibali neighbourhood, abounded from several years, after the recovery, became a cultural production centre and in his external space a social garden, now cared by the locals. All these actions were devised as exercises in collective imagination to address the future of various areas. Civil events where multimedia installations, photography exhi-bitions, major artists, graffiti artists, street artists, poetry monologues, the projection of documentaries and readings of ethics manifestos all flow together.

11 Participants in the initiative include the Active Librino Committee, Iqbal Masih social centre, Caritas Talità Kun centre, La Periferica magazine, CGIL, cultural work-shop South Media – Circolo Arci, other local cooperatives and schools.

12 All the associative structures offer courses in computer literacy for the young and adults. The Iqbal Centre, very active in involv-ing the quarter’s youth in rugby sporting activities, launched a web petition (http://camposanteodoro.altervista.org/), under-written by all the associations and citizens of the Active Librino Committee, to gain custody of the San Teodoro playing field. The property of the municipality and used

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for a certain period by Catania football club, this structure is today once again abandoned and vandalised. Antonio Presti is a militant patron of the arts whose foundation Fiumara d’Arte has been engaged in social projects involving the quarter of Librino for many years. Choosing Librino as the home of his aesthetic commitment, he created one of his most impressive works “La porta della

Bellezza”, symbol of a renewed conscience of culture and ethical spirit. He has entitled a section of his museum of contemporary art “Internet, pro-motore di bellezza” (http://www.librino.org/SITO/librino.html): a vir-tual space for internauts to share the social and civil commitment which lies at the base of his project, placing beauty and art at the centre of the quarter’s emancipation.

Smart urbanism and digital activism in Southern Italy

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