Il Pnrr offers enormous opportunities to bring innovation, technology, sustainability and experimentation capable of developing today's city smart city, a smart city able to offer services in step with the future. The theme affects citizens, understood as those who live in the city, tourists, people who come to work, administrators and of course the technicians who will have to build it.
There are many open topics and they were discussed on Tuesday evening, as part of the format "Smart city pills”, organized by Padua Engineers Foundation and by 'University of Padua. The initiative is part of the third mission project of the ICEA Department for the activities of the scientific and disciplinary sector ICAR/20 coordinated by prof. Michelangelo Savino.
Pnrr: this is how the city becomes a smart city
“This cycle of meetings – he specified Alexander Bove, University Researcher and President of the Padova Ingegneri Foundation – was born from the desire to talk about the future, after the period of crisis due to the pandemic. We need to start again from technology, rethink the paradigms of our society to build a new strategy of production processes in which man returns to the center of relationships. Each appointment is meant to be a "pill" that shows us practical examples of smart city; in particular, in the meeting on Tuesday we wanted to think about innovation in relation to Pnrr (National recovery and resilience plan) through the experiences of two companies that are implementing innovative projects to relaunch the territory".
Smart city: Open Fiber fiber to transform the city
The two companies Bove refers to are Ad Consulting and Open Fiber, present at the Padua engineers' conference. Christian Maiolo, Executive Board of AD Consulting, a company that offers consultancy, solutions and services to accompany companies in their innovation and digital transformation processes explained that “the Pnrr it presents itself as a great opportunity because it is not a financing of objects but of projects. It is the experience that underlies the Pnrr tenders, it is not a matter of mere technological equipment but of design strategies that explain how to achieve innovation and sustainability thanks to a synergy that must be implemented between universities, public administration and companies”.
Open Fiber is certainly a vector of technological innovation and digitization through the plan, currently underway, for the creation of an ultra-fast national fiber optic network, the FTTH network (Fiber To The Home). Francesco Canzian, Institutional Affairs Open Fiber stressed that “for the development of Smart City an infrastructure is essential optical fiber that has high performance and low latency to allow the exchange of an enormous amount of data in real time in order to create a digital ecosystem interconnected with a mobile network, latest generation video cameras and ICT infrastructures. The ultrabroadband network is therefore essential for services such as traffic monitoring, infrastructure, public and private buildings, for the land management and of the environment. With over 14,5 million property units already connected in Italy to its new ultra-broadband network, Open Fiber is the main Italian FTTH operator and among the first in Europe. The company aims to cover approximately 25 million real estate units, equal to 94% of Italian municipalities”.
A constructive comparison full of ideas from which it emerges that there is still a lot of work to do with some critical issues, above all related to the great difficulty of finding specialized professionals at various levels, from artificial intelligence to computer vision.
