As we get older, we understand better the reason for being a city for all ages. Therefore, the smart and creative city of the XNUMXst century can only be a socially constructed space for the full exercise of citizenship.
My thesis for the future of the smart and creative city is based on a principle of prudence and common sense: digital technologies make the city smarter, but it is urbanism in its various dimensions that makes digital technologies much smarter and more creative.
And even more than urbanism, it is the relationship between urbanity and humanity that is at stake in the city for all ages. In this regard, there is an increasingly imminent urban revolution. Cidade CIM (Intermunicipal Community) is a particular case of a city for all ages.
urbanity and humanity
A city for all ages is, first of all, a city with greater connection of its urban functions, more shared spaces and greater hybridization of public and private functions and, whenever possible, a city co-produced with its citizens, in particular, through access to public data.
A city for all ages is, secondly, a more circular and solidary city, not only because of the networking of work areas with other cities, but, above all, a city that has the ethics of care as its distinctive symbol, in particular with the senior society, not only in their mobility, but in all aspects relating to their quality of life.
A city for all ages is, thirdly, a city in which the new features and uses allowed by digital technologies interact with the architecture of public space and housing agglomerations and, in the same vein, in interaction with the urban actor, a multitasking and multifunctional citizen, more personalized and supportive, the symbol of diligent urbanity of the XNUMXst century.
A city for all ages is, in fourth place, a city with a very diversified economic and social model, a privileged relationship with the adjacent natural and agricultural areas, with a view to proximity production and consumption, but also to creation. of therapeutic recreational and leisure spaces for all ages.
A city for all ages is, fifthly, a very interactive city in cultural, artistic and recreational terms, a city that shows its technological and digital virtuosity, but that practices the art of concealment so as not to ostensibly affront well-being and the freedom of the citizen and thus contributing to a new urban aesthetic, the formation of genius and the spirit of the place, in short, to a community of destiny.
A city for all ages is, finally, a city based on a collaborative spirit, on mutual help and cooperation adjusted to the nature of each common good and with a minimum moral risk among its fellow citizens, that is, a network city, open and crystalline, where all network and agglomeration effects, external costs and benefits, are known and duly explained.
The new digital cartography of the territory
Digital territories open the way for another perspective of looking at territorial development problems. In this way, I am suggesting that the conventional cartography of making territory gives way to another less conventional and more virtual cartography of drawing the territorial map.
The conventional mode has a certain geo-referencing, if you like, a more fixed pattern of mobility, but also a more personal and emotional mode of sociability and communication. The digital mode has a different georeferencing, a flow-pattern and a more mobile cartography, as well as a more intangible and virtual sociability and communication.
If we observe the two modes of occupation of territory through the prism of the three intelligences (rational, emotional and artificial) we will see that emotional intelligence clearly loses out when we move from conventional to digital mode.
Now, it is emotional intelligence that best embodies both the occupation of the territory and our relationship with nature, and the sentimental provision for human communication and sociability.
Now, this finding is full of consequences when we look at the planning policy and urban planning of large cities, because in the same city we have two significant universes in deep interaction.
As if they were two cities in the same city: the universe of material and tangible problems that need to be digitized and virtualized (the virtualization of reality) and the universe of virtual imaginaries (virtual realism) that waits to be converted into tangible and material reality and so many real communities.
In the conventional way, citizens will have services that are physically established in the places of residence according to a certain urban geography.
The routes are familiar: the kiosk, the bookmaker, the café, the store, the public service, the bank branch, the CTT post, the pharmacy, the bookstore, the library, the office, the restaurant, the gallery, the conference room, among many other venues. In digital mode, and in many cases, it is the services that come to us, online and on our smartphone terminal: the online newspaper, the online game, online shopping, online ordering, the e-government e e-banking, the meal uberized takeaway, telework and telemedicine, digital visits to museums and galleries, the e-book, events on social networks, the webinars, among others
In this two-speed city, it remains to be seen how the respective territorial cartographies and representations of public space evolve, how the so-called green spaces are accommodated, what is the adequacy of urban architecture to this double speed and how our pattern is distributed mobility in this context. It seems, therefore, that the fixed became a flux.
CIM City, the network city for all ages
CIM City is a particular case of the city for all ages, particularly in low-density areas where the active principle of networks works well. In this case, all or almost all the features of the Smart Cities can be transferred to Smart CIM, I mean a very varied package of services that includes digital infrastructure, integrated energy networks and energy efficiency, management of smart neighborhoods, connections and urban mobility, administration in line, urban platforms and their interoperability, environment and quality of life indicators, data collection and processing, citizen security and, in general, all utilities in operation at Smart CIM.
Smart CIM is a hybrid product of rational, emotional and artificial intelligence, but also institutional intelligence and P2P collaborative intelligence (peer to peer). It is this hybridization that allows the production of very varied content and services, and also of various symbolic, artistic and cultural expressions that are so many territorial distinctive signs of the intelligent and creative city.
In summary, I leave here, for reflection, a Smart CIM instrument box for the next decade:
– The CIM Data Center and its territorial analytical platform,
– The Starting up and Coworking CIM spaces,
– The Citizen's Shops CIM,
– CIM Entrepreneur's Stores,
– The CIM Digital Literacy Program,
– The CIM Collaborative Laboratory for the green and circular economy,
– CIM platforms for common goods and CIM utilities,
– The CIM School of Arts and Technologies,
– The CIM Regional Agency for Investment Promotion,
– The Network of CIM Associations of Young Entrepreneurs.
This toolbox tells us that we are facing an imminent urban revolution composed of technology, ecology and humanity that will soon reveal to us a new theory of central places of the polycentric network city of which the Smart CIM will be one of the best examples .
Final Notes
Having arrived here, perhaps we can summarize the probable trajectory of the intelligent and creative city of the XNUMXst century as a kind of cold war between three types of intelligence: rational intelligence with extension in artificial intelligence and in augmented and virtual reality, emotional intelligence as a support for creativity and inventiveness, institutional, solidary and collaborative intelligence, as a new political and democratic intermediation.
If the war of intelligence is conducted in moderation, we will have a more polycentric territorial paradigm, with more city networks and greater integration of the natural system with the urban system, successive cycles of increasingly shorter technological and digital innovation, a small revolution in administration of open data, new value chains and many other business business models, a new organization of the labor market and many other forms of sociability, many outpatient proximity services, new symbolic languages and another culture of relationship, a new language , who knows, new modes of political regulation and governance.
In the end, we all hope that this melting pot of humanity, which is the intelligent and creative city for all ages, has actually taken place, preferably in a privileged place of our personal circumstance, for example, in a CIM of our choice.
Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve
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