The smart city and mobility: The functional polarization of urban flow

The paper deals with the definition of urban mobility, assuming that inside the city, the flow of mobility is deeply connected with the distribution, quality and use of the urban activities that “polarize” different users (residents, commuters, tourists and city users). In this vision, ICT assume a strategic role, but the need to reconsider their role emerges in respect to the concept of a smart city. The consideration that “urban smartness” does not depend exclusively on the ICT component or on the quantitative presence of technologies in the city, in fact, represents a shared opinion within the current scientific debate on the subject of the smart city. The paper assumes that, for the present urban contexts, the smart vision has to be related to an integrated approach, which considers the city as a complex system. Inside the urban system, the networks for both material and immaterial mobility interact with the urban activities that play a supporting role and have characteristics that affect the levels of urban smartness. Changes in urban systems greatly depend on the sorts of innovation technology that have intensely modified the social component to a far greater extent than others. Big Data, for instance, can help with knowledge of urban processes, provided they have to be well-interpreted and managed, and this will be of interest within the interactions among urban systems and the functioning of the system as a whole. Town planning has to take on responsibility in regard to approaching cities according to a different vision and updating its tools in order to steer the urban system steadfastly into a smartness state. In a systemic vision, this transition must be framed within the context of a process of governmental transformation that is carefully oriented towards the individuation of interactions among the different subsystems composing the city. According to this vision, the study of urban mobility can be related to the attractiveness generated by the different urban functions. The formalization of the degree of polarization, activated by urban functions, represents the main objective of this study. Among the urban functions, the study considers tourism as one of the most significant in the formalization of urban mobility flow inside the smart city.