Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
future, a generational urgency other than a project for the future driven by
knowledge, capacity and inclusiveness, which must work together in harmony.
Within a new political vision based on sharing knowledge, skills' impact may
take various forms. The pervasive presence of the media, the wireless connection
and the increasingly geolocalized social networks changes the way we commu-
nicate, think, feel, asses and decide. As a consequence, all areas of our lives are
affected: work, investment, innovation, study, social cohesion and politics. Con-
sequently, the expertise possessed by knowledge workers needs strengthening, and
the same applies to knowledge leaders. It is not a matter of cognitive and rational
practice, but rather of emotion, relationship and ethics other than the ability to
understand, guide, change and mobilize diverse knowledge in order to deliver
increasingly collective results. In order to provide leaders with the necessary tools
to understand the dynamics they are about to implement, the socio-cultural know-
how is a fundamental prerequisite.
Shirky (
2010
) describes the cognitive and leading force of crowdsourcing, the
crowd that, by building common opinions and working together through the net-
work produces a true ''cloud politics'': a widespread policy constantly enveloping
us both as electors and decision-makers thus eliminating distances while reducing
the pondering spaces. Political action and politicians' reaction merge in a short
circuit that produces a virtuous participation on the one hand, and a vicious
fragmentation of decision on the other hand. Not only do changes affect the
economic and relational realm, but they are being, with growing pervasiveness,
transferred to the physical realm, as regards physiognomy and physiology of the
cities, intelligent. However, a smarter city is not the one whose traditional orga-
nization boasts the most intelligent and efficient technology, but the city that
profoundly alters the development dynamics and revisits its housing and mobility
patterns rethinking its metabolism through efficient urban cycles.
Increasing the infrastructural smartness is not sufficient, as cities ought to
endeavour to increase the rate of collective intelligence, by supporting, via cloud
communting, virtuous behaviour from the bottom and raising the profile of a new
way to understand urbanism displaying its individual and collecting benefits.
Smart communities are increasingly characterise by platforms for service whose
value lies in the offered facilities considered useful by the users, which in turn
translate them into additional services to other users. A sort of mutual complicity is
therefore important between the platform and the value-adding users, which can be
implemented provided the platform/user relationship is ''transparent'', ''open'' and
''authentic'' hence included in the new citizenship pact.
There are two words that best sum up the new virtuous relationship between
information and open communities. The first is Open Data and is about the mil-
lions of available data that public administrations are networking in a challenging
race to share data within a democratic knowledge process. The Open Data com-
ponent is indispensable to open governance, in which governments are open to
citizens both in terms of transparency and especially of direct participation in
decision-making processes, promoting the use of ICT inasmuch as they accelerate
the empowerment of communities, virtual in the first place and increasingly real
