top of page

FLEXIBILITY, RESILIENCE

AND SMARTNESS

FLEXIBILITY

RESILIENCE

SMARTNESS

The city needs a remarkable capacity to continuously familiarize to temporary circumstances. This is an adaptive process that involves the “city” such as organism, and it is possible to summarize it by the term “flexibility”. The term is assumed as a development of the organic-adaptive-evolutionist approach to urban studies (references come from many authors in at least one century, i.e. Geddes, Piccinato, Choay). [See for instance at: http://www-4.unipv.it/uplab/UPlab/Home.html]  Flexibility is expressed in different dimensions, such as the flexibility of: relational systems (called “variable geometry”); government systems; environmental system and ecological planning (with a very close link to resilience); predictive capacity of urban simulation; physical systems (in example functionalization and de-functionalization) and network structures. A Flexible city is efficient and smart, it optimizes resources and increases resilience.

"A Resilient City is one that has developed capacities to help absorb future shocks and stresses to its social, economic, and technical systems and infrastructures so as to still be able to maintain essentially the same functions, structures, systems, and identity.” [http://www.resilientcity.org/index.cfm?id=11449]. Resilience involves classical issues such as restoration of functions through mutation and adaptation. The capacity of an urban area to be resilient depends on the organization and the relationships that existed before the event; considering that a flexible system allows the rapid recovery of activities, flexibility approach helps to reach resilience goals.

The term "smart" identify a city which combines innovation, environment and quality of life. The "smart city" is the result of a structural dimension, cognitive and public-policy of the city, capable of reconciling innovation, development, economy and culture in order to promote sustainable development. “Smart city” is nowadays a sort of worldwide “logo” mainly referred to technology and to technological applications to urban and metropolitan contexts. The smartness of city is a merge of more complex concepts and the debate among planners and designers is aiming more to a “clever” city than to a smart one. Moreover, technology is an opportunity to reach results, its use is not the result itself. So the problem is to define clever-smart results and to find the easiest way to grasp them throughout technological instruments.

bottom of page