Modelli di governo e di governance delle smart city, il caso italiano

Despite the notoriety that the term “smart city” is acquiring, nowadays there is still a lot of uncertainty about its meaning. For some reasons it is often hard to work out the features and the common rules of smart cities: because this is a recent phenomenon, because smart cities are driven either by a bottom-up or a top-down process and because there is no single agreed definition of “smart city”.

This paper is based on the results obtained by an empirical survey conducted with reference to the 117 Province Seats; its aim is to verify the existence of governmental and governance structures involved in smart cities’ processes, analyzing their features and understanding if there is any recurring model. Our analysis reveals a heterogeneous scenario and it is able to show that in most cases cities don’t take advantage of any specific governmental structure while, in few cases, they adopt different governance forms like Associations or Foundations.