Search

This paper presents the outcomes of a three-year research project developed by the Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU), in collaboration with Telecom Italia. Looking at territorial smartness from a spatial perspective, that leaves aside the purely technological aspects, the research aims at exploring different ICT potentialities: from new uses of space, to socio-economic and physical regeneration. With this goal, it reflects about the possible updating of concepts, which are widely used in urban planning: (i) from smart city to smart region, to deal with the regional scale of contemporary cities, thus including peripheral and marginal ‘in-between’ spaces; (ii) from urban nodes to urban digital nodes, to design multi-scalar smart spaces able to integrate traditional and digital services; (iii) from Internet of Things to Internet of Places, to make spaces able to interact through (at the same time) real and virtual experiences of users. These theoretical references are explored within the scenario of the metropolitan region between Milan and Turin. According to these issues, this paper presents the research process to the UDN localization along the infrastructural bundle between Milan and Turin: from the identification of urban/infrastructural nodes, to the selection of potential Urban Digital Nodes. Furthermore, it highlights the UDN contribution to a smart region development through the spatial implementation of an Internet of Places.

Maps have always been tools that have fascinated men, for their ability to make us see the world that surrounds us. They were and are the outcome of models and methods applied to the observation of the world, starting from geodesy, surveying photogrammetry and remote sensing. All these disciplines, which we now group under the new name of geomatics, have had a tremendous boost in recent years. However, the synergy with information computer technology is probably the aspect that is revolutionizing more cartography. Earlier computers and after the Internet have brought us to new concepts and tools that will have profound effects not only in the world of niche of cartographers, but also more generally in the life of all human beings. The Digital Earth, proposed in 1998 by Al Gore, has been enriched in just twenty years of a set of new demands, which make even more interesting and challenging being cartographers today. The paper, without claiming to be comprehensive, aims at providing a concise overview of the state of art and of the advancement in this area. Moreover, it urges the community of geomatics to be protagonist and promoter of a new cartography, largely to be reinvented, and that would put us at the center of processes of knowledge and management of the Earth. The map makers in the past helped discovering new worlds, now the challenge is to rediscover our common world with new eyes of environmental, social, economic equity, sustainability and participation.