SCENARIO
Modern cities are becoming more and more representative of a changing world, where several trends are clearly emerging: constantly improving technological innovation, fast and chaotic urbanization, ageing population in Western countries and simultaneous demographic growth in emerging countries, global warming and environmental pollution are just some of them. Recent studies assess that by 2050 nearly 70% of the world population will live in cities, thus characterizing these urban conglomerations as the most energy-consuming entities (75% of the world energy by 2050) and as the main responsible for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 75% by 2030 and up to 80% by 2050) worldwide (International Energy Agency, IEA).

According to the city concept proposed by the ISO/IEC standards institution, “a city is a system of systems with unique history and set in a specific environmental and societal context” which needs “all the key city actors to work together, utilizing all their resources, to over-come the challenges and grasp the opportunities that the city faces”. In such an extremely variegated context, cities must become “smarter” in order to improve citizenship’s life quality and societal conditions, to exploit the available resources more effectively, to achieve the expected goals and fulfil the purposes set up by policy makers and, at the same time, without affecting or endangering the environment and by making all of this economically sustainable.

Potential topics of interest, which can be investigated from different perspectives (social, organizational, technological) include, but are not limited to, the fol-lowing application domains:
• E-Health

• Agriculture and Food

• Smart Energy & Smart Buildings

• Mobility, Transports & Logistics

• Environment Management and sustainability

• E-tourism & E-culture

• E-education

• E-government

• E-inclusion

• Urban Security

• Effective experiences about smarter and sustainable cities

• How to empower Smart Citizenship

• Sociotechnical Systems

• Societal impact of Smart City solutions

• Public/private partnerships enabling Smart City solutions

• Successful projects and initiatives for Smart Cities

ICT perspective

Technological innovation can drive cities to significant levels of smartness in several areas:

• Smart urban environment, by fostering energy consumption reduction and environmental sustainability

• Smart living, by providing high-quality healthcare and wellbeing services, home-automation and smart-home solutions

• Smart city governance, by promoting the effective interconnection across institutions and administrations and by allowing citizens to access services more easily

• Smart urban mobility, by supporting novel solutions for people and good transportation

• Smart citizenship, by offering people new, engaging e-educational opportunities which exploit collaborative remote learning and online participation

The sociotechnical perspective

ICT infrastructures and services represent the two most relevant and mutually related key technological drivers enabling cities to achieve their smartness. In order to actually become Smart Cities, indeed, municipalities around the world must leverage the opportunities disclosed by ICT infrastructures – such as cloud computing solutions, pervasive communication systems, open broadband networks, sensor technologies and intelligent data management systems – in order to deliver a broad range of services to their citizens and administrators.

This scenario is featured by a tight interaction between people and technologies in their daily life, both in workplaces and homes, thus connecting the ICT infrastructures and services to Sociotechnical Systems (STSs). A correct analysis and exploitation of STSs represent, in our opinion, the third pillar for a true achievement of the Smart City model, so that new generations (the so-called “Millennials”) can exploit smart devices to reduce digital gaps and improve the urban efficiency.

The social perspective

Citizens are becoming more and more the primary research and market source of insights, since infrastructure and services providers aim at offering life-enhancing or life-changing solutions to them (e.g., smart energy metering, e-shopping, e-health, traffic management, smart environmental monitoring, shared transports, etc.), capable of creating truly intelligent collaborations and automated information flows between devices and people.

From such challenging premises, the core mission of the conference is to address key topics on ICT infrastructures (technologies, models, frameworks) and services fostering the smart city model, in order to enhance performance and wellbeing, to reduce costs and resource consumption, to cope with societal impacts, to take into consideration citizens’ opinions and to engage them more effectively in urban life. The conference aims to be an opportunity for people from academia, industries and public institutions to meet in the same arena and define new collaborations in the perspective of future project calls. Therefore, it will include a scholar track (whose results will be published in Springer) to disseminate theoretical scientific activities, as well as it will leave room to present available innovative solutions and active research projects, and novel ideas for project proposals.