A multilevel method to assess and design the renovation and integration of Smart Cities

Contemporary cities are the scenes of sudden and numerous changes from social, economical and environmental points of view. The capability for cities to endorse, foster, enhance ongoing transformations and modern challenges is obstructed by the unsuitableness and lack of communication and integration of both material and immaterial infrastructures. The new vision of Smart Cities can fill these gaps, as it represents a balance among hardware and software aspects, technology and human capital, and it aims at realizing and guaranteeing the quality of life to the inhabitants. At today, there is absence of uniformity both in the definition and in the concept development of a Smart City, and there are not practical methodologies supporting the evaluation models developed in literature. The approach often does not appear as a holistic, complete and integrated, but as a combination of sector-based non communicating and non integrated actions. In this framework, the aim of this paper is to outline a planning methodology of actions to realize a Smart City that provides a holistic and specific approach to territories and cities by taking into account the specific features of the context and by developing different and appropriate strategies. According to this, a way to integrate the various aspects of a Smart City through the definition of the relations existing among all the subsystems of the city, considered as a whole (human) organism, has been developed. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.