Smart cities, landscape and urban regeneration: ranking methods

The chapter offers an analysis of the topic of smart cities and the evolution of urban planning. Land use law has been a subject of major attention and repeated in-depth studies aimed at mapping out the evolution of the concept. Over the last two centuries, the way in which land regulation is understood has developed in line with industrial society. The notion of a “smart city” has emerged on a global scale, initially adopting an extremely broad scope that includes all aspects of land regulation: from building regulations to town planning law, and from networks and public services to the use of IT and participatory arrangements. The interplay, overlap, and often tension between urban planning interests in a strict sense and external interests, which were soon defined as “differentiated,” was the main factor in bringing about the shift to the next phase, which is still ongoing. Due to the variegated and heterogeneous nature of the interests now at stake, it is not possible to order them into a stable hierarchy. The new model of urban planning, enriched by the interpenetration of various public interests and transformed into a larger vehicle, is contradictory. On the one hand, the mediation between expectations that are not rigidly ordained or at least only partially harmonized calls for a centripetal approach; on the other hand, this requires the maintenance of, and indeed the increasing search for, some measure of local consensus. As such, the urban dimension has now perhaps irreversibly embarked on a classificatory pathway that has gradually become more technological in nature, in line with the genesis of the idea of "smartness." The concepts drawn from traditional sociology and political science must confront the consensual self-legitimization of technology, which offers an image of rationalization that probably exceeds its own capacities. The contribution finally takes into consideration various types of international rankings, such as the Global Cities Report published by ATKearney, the Global Outlook Global Cities of the Future, the Japanese Global Power City Index, and many others.