Abstract

Digital platforms are having an impact on urban landscape comparable to the one of the big offices spreading around a century ago. The evidence of this process is in the changes of the trade and of the transport of humans and goods. During the next decade the transformation will be wide and wild due to the geometrical expansions of data, the computing capacity and the so called A.I. systems. There aren’t solutions which could be socially neutral or valid in any context. There isn’t something such as a technological determinism, yet there are viable alternative projects which are made sustainable by technical developments, whose results could be very different according to the various political and social conflicts and negotiations. In order to consent a comparison among alternative projects, the main commitment of territorial administrations in this time is that to reduce the informative asymmetry among the different subjects affected by this change. During the next years millions of sensors will be spread on the basis of territorial authorization which will have to include an access to data on the ground of public interest. Some examples of this process are already in sight and anticipate new models of architecture of workplaces and of communication networks in smaller cities and neighborhoods. Italy is an ideal lab to develop research and application of platforms for the care of territories and hydrogeological systems. If we look forward to the next decade, we can imagine that our cities will be the primal stage for the interaction of data coming from nature, culture, people and machines.