WOULD URBAN CULTURAL HERITAGE BE SMART? CULTURE AS A LAND FACTOR AND ITALIAN CITIES’ SMARTNESS

Mário Neve

Mário Neve Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna, Bologna [IT]

Resumo

The issue of cultural heritage and the topical subject of “smart cities” don’t seem to be a perfect match when it comes to the prevailing definitions of the nature of cities’ smartness. The strong accent and focus on information production and management — then ICT centrality — in basically any mainstream definition of smart cities overemphasises the computing version of intelligence, a version which represents an enduring research study field of cognitive science: the idea that human cognition is basically dependent on logic and calculation, then it can be studied and simulated by computing machines.

The essay adopts a different notion of smartness: one which associates brains, bodies, and things, according to the “extended-distributed mind” and “material engagement” approaches. In such a perspective, urban cultural heritage reveals itself as the core of cities’ intelligence: as the living interplay of bodies, minds, and urban built environment all interacting in giving birth to what is usually called “intangible cultural heritage”.

To develop such an approach, focusing on the current trend of regeneration projects in Mediterranean cities, the essays at first debunks the idea of urban cultural heritage as an (almost exclusively) economic asset, which mistakes city’s smartness (or “creativity”) for the conscious dependency on monopoly rent market laws and tourism flows and fluctuations.
Secondly, the essay presents an example of complexity of urban cultural heritage, namely the Italian one, outlining the cultural, geographical, and historical contexts from which it comes, in order to exemplify why considering to make a city ‘smart’ (or enhance its supposed smartness) in concentrating projects and resources primarily on ICT technologies is meaningless: because the relations put in place by urban cultural heritage are webs of connectivity to be studied taking into account their wholeness.

Finally, on the ground of the underlying assumption that cities are the oldest known form and model of artificial intelligence (within the framework of the “extended- distributed mind” and “material engagement” theories), the essay points out the urgent necessity of interdisciplinary research projects being able to look at the interrelations among all cities’ parts (including peripheries, decaying zones, suburbs), to bring out the potential smartness any city has.

Starting from urban cultural heritage as the very core of cities’ mind, meant as a coevolving assemblage of built environment (urbs, the city of stones) and people (civitas, the city of human beings), research can play a major role in hampering the speculative exploitation of urban milieus.

cultural heritage, place/space, cities’ smartness, artificial intelligence, geography, extended-distributed mind, material engagement theory.

Biografia Autor

Mário Neve, Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna, Bologna [IT]

Mario Neve, Degree summa cum laude in Political Sciences at the I.U.O. of Naples (thesis in Political and Economic Geography), PhD in Urban and Regional Geography at the University of Pisa, Mario Neve is full professor of Geography and currently teaches: Cultural Geography, Geography of Historic Towns and Landscapes, and Geography of the Euro-Mediterranean Region at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus.

He is Program Director of the international MA International Cooperation on Human Rights and Intercultural Heritage of the Department of Cultural Heritage.
Among his various teaching and research activities abroad, he has been visiting scholar at the Faculty of Arts of the University of British Columbia of Vancouver (Program in Canadian Studies), at the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies of York University of Toronto (with a fellowship awarded by the Canadian Studies Faculty Research Award), KRAFT Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies Köszeg, Hungary, visiting scholar at the History Department of the East China Normal University of Shanghai.

He has published four books and many articles and essays in Italy and abroad. His latest book is Europe’s Design: Mapping European Identities Through Time forthcoming by Springer.