Cities as innovation poles in the digital transition. The Italian case

Since their foundations, cities configured themselves as places of innovation, where flows of people, goods, services, ideas, culture, met and, through interaction allowed spreading of new ideas, solutions, applications. The traditional, spontaneous, way of spreading of innovation has recently left the pace to more structured systems. To-date, innovation is part of structured and prepared business models in enterprises, and it is very often rooted into policies of local, regional, and national development. Cities are not an exception to that, and investment on innovative systems and methods can make the difference in the success or failure of cities. Following the literature on urban geography dealing with the urban life cycle, covering also the most recent evolutions, summarized, as a matter of example, in Florida’s ‘New Urban Crisis’, the present work aims at observing the most recent urban dynamics between spatial, urban demographic changes in view of the ‘demographic winter’ that Italy, together with many industrialized and more mature economies, is experimenting. The work analyses the Italian urban system, considering the urban dynamics in terms of population change, in its different administrative and functional aggregations, observing their characteristics and evolutions in recent times (2019–2023, pre and post Covid-19 pandemics), highlighting the formation of urban ‘champions’ and proposing a spatial analysis observing and evaluating their characteristics in terms of population dynamics.