CITY AND ENVIRONMENT, AND FUTURE CITY

Summary of the opening speech of Vittorio Cogliati Dezza, president Legambiente, Italie
 
There a lot of talks about smart city, but very little about the  fact that there aren’t smart city if there are not smart citizens, unless you want to reduce the presence of  smart to some display which informs the public.

And the formation of intelligent citizens also depends on the reality in which they are deepen  daily and then the space that is the priority of acculturation and urban education.
The urban space today produces and causes leakage, crossovers,  motionless speed  , if we look at it from the point of view of urbanization diffused and dispersed Sprowl of urban land consumption, from the point of view of the pioneer colonization of shopping centers and highways confluences, but the urban space is also the place where you are consuming the paradox of Western democracies that see wear on their territory conquest of universal suffrage, because higher and higher percentage of residents do not have voting rights on that land. Not only that, it is also the place that is now in danger of being organized in silos in the so-called ethnic neighborhoods, in contradiction with that old slogan of Italian municipalities "city air makes you free".
But today is emerging a real opportunity to rethink and reorganize urban space, according to the new ways of life, the economy of sharing, which is spreading, applications for care and belonging to their new location, the recognition of their advantage in the common good and general interest (recycling, energy saving, ....), depending on the revival of shared spaces such as eco-neighborhoods ....
These dynamics, which have obvious implications for anthropological and educational, are not the result of some social subject illuminated, but the result of strategic choices, which are, for example, made ​​explicit by the European Union, to give urgent and appropriate responses to climate change . One that opens today is a very interesting scenario that is played around the big question of whether the transformation of existing urban areas in resilient cities is a  only technical or deeply cultural process. The outcome is not obvious, we are at a crossroads where it is good to be aware of.