Digital services for an internet of places: urban digital nodes for a smart region between Milan and Turin

This paper presents the outcomes of a three-year research project developed by the Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU), in collaboration with Telecom Italia. Looking at territorial smartness from a spatial perspective, that leaves aside the purely technological aspects, the research aims at exploring different ICT potentialities: from new uses of space, to socio-economic and physical regeneration. With this goal, it reflects about the possible updating of concepts, which are widely used in urban planning: (i) from smart city to smart region, to deal with the regional scale of contemporary cities, thus including peripheral and marginal ‘in-between’ spaces; (ii) from urban nodes to urban digital nodes, to design multi-scalar smart spaces able to integrate traditional and digital services; (iii) from Internet of Things to Internet of Places, to make spaces able to interact through (at the same time) real and virtual experiences of users. These theoretical references are explored within the scenario of the metropolitan region between Milan and Turin. According to these issues, this paper presents the research process to the UDN localization along the infrastructural bundle between Milan and Turin: from the identification of urban/infrastructural nodes, to the selection of potential Urban Digital Nodes. Furthermore, it highlights the UDN contribution to a smart region development through the spatial implementation of an Internet of Places