Smart Technologies, Back-to-the-Village Rhetoric, and Tactical Urbanism: Post-COVID Planning Scenarios in Italy

2. Post-Covid Smart And Tactical (Anti)Urbanism: Policies, Practices And Rhetoric

Over the last decades, several cities at the global scale have developed sustainable-oriented agendas through a variegated repertoire of strategies, policies and practices. Cities are regarded as the most appropriate “living workshops” to analyze the increasing interaction among ICT’s, local sustainable development, bottom-up participation and urban planning (Certomà et al. 2015).

Among the numerous theoretical and operational paradigms, particularly two “mantras” have fostered discourses on urban planning, notably during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Embedded at the opposite poles of two urban planning visions, but at the same time paradoxically converging, the Smart city framework and, more recently, Tactical Urbanism have been transversally mobilized to envision new forms and functions of contemporary cities.