Urban transformations do not bring about insurmountable technical and urban problems: they bring political questions, to which no purely technical answers exist. innovation. The innovative process is political, just as it is social and cultural. Therefore, it is legitimate to ask how the strategy of transformation through innovation and technology can address the challenges of the new urban question, in particular how can innovation, arising from local initiatives, contribute to the whole development process? At the heart of the understanding of the linkage between innovation and urban policy is the idea that local development is built not on a sectoral basis, nor by the forces of the market, but as the result
of a chain of individual or collective – and political – actions, interconnected through local initiatives or projects with interests, sometimes divergent, but often convergent. The City is regaining its original significance: a form of political and social organisation, however, with concepts and tools largely inherited from the industrial era; thus economy and technology are insufficient to overcome the complexity of functioning and evolution of our urbanised living environment. The City is quintessentially political.
Urban transformations do not bring about insurmountable technical and urban problems: they bring political questions, to which no purely technical answers exist. If a crisis exists, it is a crisis of representation, of the image, of the ownership of the City by its inhabitants. The uncertainties arise from the inadequate or inappropriate technical or conceptual planning responses to the realities of the people who live in the city. Therefore we need to change, more than anything, our approach to the city: we have to stop measuring or describing the city, constructing and managing the city in the same terms and with the same tools we used before. The movement towards an “Innovative City” is a chance to build the City of tomorrow differently. ■ 71
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