Smart City – People, Technology and Materials
Smart City – People, Technology and Materials is an exhibition-event organized by Material ConneXion Italia (today Materially) which took place in two editions, in 2018 and 2019, starting from an intuition of Emilio Genovesi, who already in 2017 had proposed an embryonic version centered on materials.
The interest aroused by the so-called “zero edition” gave rise to the first integrated exhibition-conference project, in which the physical exhibition was accompanied by moments of confrontation, lectures open to the public, film screening, stories of experiences, all in the Time frame of the Design Week.
Smart City – People, Technology and Materials. Aprile 2019.
The concept developed by Giulio Ceppi, curator of both editions, places man and the community at the center of the Smart City, exploring the typical model of the Italian city, namely the Latin way to the Smart City. The Latin way starts precisely from the importance of the morphological and urban characteristics, of the territorial and climatic specificities, of the housing cultures and lifestyles of our country, and moves the center of smartness from technology to the citizen who uses it. A city is smart when its citizenship is, and in this sense technology is only a tool to achieve this result.
Smart City – People, Technology and Materials. Aprile 2018.
Following this concept, the exhibition was built around six clusters: Advanced Building + Infrastructures, Connected City + Net Citizenship, Smart Living + Cultural Inclusion, Sustainable + Circular City, Integrated Mobility + Accessibility, Food Policy + Human Agriculture, to which added is the artistic vision of Yona Friedman who, in one of his latest works, has interpreted the theme of hospitality with an outdoor installation consisting of small shelter units surrounded by sculptures of waste materials.
Smart City – People, Technology and Materials. April 2018.
The enormous success of this first edition and the number and quality of public, financial institutions and companies that joined the event, prompted Emilio Genovesi to propose an even more ambitious project, carried out in 2019: 5 weeks of exhibition, from the Digital to the Design Week, in which 35 meetings were held including workshops, conferences and round tables, with over 200 speakers and which reached 45,000 visitors. Difficult to define it only “an exhibition”; rather, a meeting space and a moment of collective thought in which topics such as smart and driverless mobility, circular economy, climate change, sustainability, social innovation, new urbanization and regeneration, digital literacy, big data and blockchains, decarbonisation, finance, but also food and fashion were addressed.
Smart City – People, Technology and Materials. April 2019.
It was a huge laboratory that generated exchanges and reasoning on how to rethink urban living in the light of the great transformations underway, the technological ones and those related to climate change, offering Milan, for 5 weeks, an opportunity to reflect on the city of the future; a very timely reflection.
Book “Smart City – People, Technology and Materials”. October 2019
The book “Smart City – People, Technology and Materials”, which collects abstracts and citations from the 28 panels, as well as the account of the experiences presented in the physical exhibition, can be purchased for € 24.90. Request your copy
