Leveraging technology evolution for better and sustainable cities

Everywhere we see municipalities setting up projects for Smart Cities. It has become a sort of a "mantra" word. But when we look at their plans we get different perspectives on what they call a "smart city". Sometimes they refer to smoother traffic, rational use of energy, sometimes to garbage recycling, sometimes to a healthier environment, ... These are all "improvements" and obviously desirable ones. However, what is it that characterizes a city to the point of being called Smart? In this paper I claim that it is awareness of the infrastructure and the capability to increase awareness of people living there. In an ideal world we already have all the technologies we need to create awareness of designing our cities from scratch. This is what is being done in places like Songdu and Masdar. But in "our world" we already have cities and the challenge is to evolve them in an economically sustainable way in synch with their inhabitants expectations, needs and desires. We can leverage technology evolution for this as well. And this is the focus of my talk. How can we make use of technologies like embedded electronics, screens, data harvesting and analyses (big data) and infrastructures like LTE with its native IP to evolve our cities into smarter places where people love to live. In doing that I'll make reference to some particular examples, like the projects in Italy on the Smart Cities Cluster and in projects in the EIT ICT LABS framework.