Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
today, other than generating renewed physical spaces fuelled by knowledge,
sharing and inclusiveness.
2
One of the most interesting challenges is represented
by Open Gov and how it can contribute to improve the ''spatial based digital
communities''. The social movements set up online have increased inclusiveness
and, in order to avoid infertile self-referentiality, they need to ''tie up with the
territory''. According to Manuel Castells (
2012
) online and offline networks ought
to be joined to obtain the new politics, that is the new ''common city''.
The other keyword is Big Data, the immense amount of data not only from
government websites, but from social networks too, from blogs and specialistic
websites that, if adequately designed, managed and interconnected, allow gener-
ating knowledge that could not be possibly obtained through traditional sources.
Imagine planning the transport system of a city not only based on the service
provider's information, but with the possibility to rely on users' feedbacks: their
tweets, their complaints, thematic blogs, traffic information from the local police,
data regarding ongoing or planned construction sites, information about planned
strikes and demonstrations, the calendar of major events, citizens location trends
and the list could be longer. All of these potential information must be handled
within a city model allowing its use in terms of urban planning and design,
otherwise they will just be ''noise floor''.
Open Data and Big Data management is not limited to the administrative sphere
or to decision-making processes, but requires the traditional urban planning's
cognitive model to be revised. It requires us not only to modify the protocols on
which we base the plan's knowledge, but also to create new planning instruments.
Hence, the first forms of Open-source Urbanism (Sassen
2011
). We should
therefore begin to outline it and experience its practices in order to identify the
main application protocols. We find ourselves in a smarter dynamic and innovative
context therefore. Above all, it is shared and open, and ought to be also more
''senseable'', aware and responsible. A proper Cloud Governance, not to be turned
into a new mantra however: it ought to cooperate with leaderships and technoc-
racies, with the directors and planners of the change, the actors in the transfor-
mation and the civil society to understand the extent to which the issue of openness
2
The first large-scale experiment was carried out by the U.S. Government in 2009, launched by
Barack Obama as a challenge based on the establishment of an informed and responsible com-
munity, able to be actively involved in the government decisions on the major current issues, such
as environmental, social and health, then immediately extended to citizens participation in the
urban-related choices by sharing the information possessed by experts and institutional decision-
makers in an effective empowerment process. In Italy, the Open Governmental season opened in
late 2011 following the
www.dati.gov.it
portal, in which the landscape managing process is
gradually evolving towards increasingly open models, able to promote the setting up of a truly
inclusive governance of territorial transformations. Recently, the Minister of Territorial Cohesion
has launched the portal opencoesione.gov.it dedicated to the implementation of the 2007-2013
investments to allow citizens to assess whether the projects meet their expectations and whether
the available resources are adequately employed, thus facilitating the reprogramming or acti-
vation of corrections and/or steps forward.
