Smart cities in a smart world

Very often the concept of smart city is strongly related to the flourishing of mobile applications, stressing the technological aspects and a top-down approach of high-tech centralized control systems capable of resolving all the urban issues, completely forgetting the essence of a city with its connected problems. The real challenge in future years will be a huge increase in the urban population and the changes this will produce in energy and resource consumption. It is fundamental to manage this phenomenon with clever approaches in order to guarantee a better management of resources and their sustainable access to present and future generations. This chapter develops some considerations on these aspects, trying to insert the technological issues within a framework closer to planning and with attention to the social impact.