The Project
Verona smart city is a urban project that wants to transform Verona in a creative hub, connected with the best sources of innovation. Verona is a small city (250.000 inhabitants” with a very favourable position in the transport network of northern Italy. As it has strong opportunities in tourism and creative innovation, we put emphasis on connecting its creativity opportunities. The process of the project is led by the EU 2020 strategy, in the three objectives: creativity, inclusion, sustainability.
The main design tool is mapping, since it is at the moment the most open and powerful tool we have to communicate planning to people.
Action proposal
The project identifies some actions that could be implemented with the help of the public administration in order to revitalize some core areas of the city.
- From the station to the fair: opportunity to build a creative street to attract skilled travelers and a creative platform to connect to other cities – actually the area is dismissed
- Verona connections, a study of public mobility and free wifi hotspots interchange – actually the mobility and connection services are not linked.
- Bastioni park: a green park for the city with pedestrian mobility – actually the area isn’t entirely open to the public.
Steps
The project started in 2012 with the project Verona Lab, a vision for urban creativity. The next step was the creation of a platform of professionals able to develop the project (ICT experts, architects, communication), and the creation of a community through social network (https://twitter.com/veronasmartcity) . On May 2013 we had the first Conference of Verona Smart City. On October 2013 we had an exhibition at Magazzini Generali, were we showed the citizens the amount of vacant areas of our cities (http://www.newcreativeinnovation.it/).
At the moment we are developing the social mapping in collaboration with Open Street Map community