From a Smart City to a Smart Up-Country. The New City-Territory of L’Aquila

Ever since it was founded in the Middle Ages, the city of L’Aquila has been known as a City-territory. This was because it was established through an original unification process involving approximately 70 minor centres, which transferred a number of their inhabitants into the new City, in an act that we today would call Territorial Cohesion, thereby forming a city that was inextricably linked to its territory. While it is now undergoing radical transformation with dedicated resources, it is within this context that the issue of Smart Cities has emerged, which has, however, focused its work solely on established urban systems and historic centres. By reflecting on L’Aquila’s role as a City-territory, which falls within the disadvantaged inland areas, and by preparing the Project in the Junction 2 - Abruzzo Territories of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport and the Abruzzo Region, we are able to extend the objectives of the Smart-City to the L’Aquila City-territory and in particular to the Seismic Crater, a pertinent example of an “inland area” (or rather “Up-Country”) that today has been increasingly deprived of its identified resources. With a view to the development of inland areas based on the “smart” concept and involving planned integration between the Macro-region, the Territory Project and the Urban Planning Project, this paper supports the need for immediate intervention in the L’Aquila City-territory, and more broadly speaking for the entire territorial settlement system that is a feature of inland areas in Abruzzo. Nowadays, it is not possible to prepare a development project for inland areas without providing them with suitable access to connectivity and other more general networks