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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
Introduction
Fifteen years ago, President Bill Clinton popularized the notion of ‘smart city’. For him, a smart city had to be a sustainable city. But the expression was quickly taken up in the digital world. Firms such as Cisco and IBM seized on it to promote their tools and solutions. The message was clear: the (smart) city was to be digital or not be. As is it often the case in this sector, companies are moving quickly into action, without worrying about social responsibility.
This chapter is about the recovery process in L’Aquila after the 2009 earthquake and adopts the ‘repairing’ prospective (Centemeri et al, 2022). The L’Aquila smart city (SC) model has to be understood as a techno-centric and depoliticized recovery infrastructure and urban management platform. The aim of this chapter is to epistemologically address the imaginary underlying the SC paradigm when it is evoked as an operational ‘model’ of city transformation. What is at stake is the negotiation – or lack thereof – of the meaning to be given to the event and what its recovery should consist of. From this point of view, the reconstruction of L’Aquila in an ‘innovative’, ‘smart’ key represents nothing less than a new way of dispossession (Harvey, 2003) of public and political space (Arendt, 2013) for its inhabitants. This technocratic idea of recovery is strongly related to another one that considers catastrophes as ‘opportunity’ windows to ‘develop’ or re-develop a ‘marginal’ or ‘internal’ area (Barca, 2014).
During the recovery phase, and following government-imposed disaster management, local authorities, along with university and research centres, have come together to imagine and plan reconstruction. In this way, rhetoric and ideologies of development have not only been imposed in the symbolic sphere of discourse (media, institutional communication, debates and conferences) but also in the physical space of the city (infrastructures). The materiality of the smart transformation can be seen above all in the rethinking of infrastructures (5G, smart tunnels, speed loops, smart grids, smart meters, urban sensors and data centres), which become the central hubs in the implementation of the smartness of the reconstruction in L’Aquila.
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