By 2020, the EU will have invested about €11 billion on the European project that promotes e Smart Cities; medium-sized urban realities – with a population between 100,000 and 500,000, a catchment area of less than 1,5 million people, but with at least one university – that a study carried out in 2007 by the Polytechnic of Vienna, University of Ljubljana and Polytechnic of Delft estimated about 600 (hosting nearly 40% of the entire urban European population). Now, the projects that are being developed, funded and, in some cases, created relate to interventions to improve the lives of citizens in the six areas identified by this study: Smart Economy, Smart Mobility, Smart Environment, Smart People, Smart Living and Smart Governance.

Europe is, therefore, encouraging the “intelligent” community that go towards solutions “integrated and sustainable offering clean and safe affordable energy to citizens, reducing consumption and creating new markets in Europe and elsewhere”; a consideration, in line with the requests contained in the Communication “Europe 2020”, that indicates by that date the five EU targets which will guide the process and will be translated into national targets.

They relate to employment, research and innovation, climate change and energy, education and the fight against poverty. They are, in essence, interventions on the existing city, primarily aimed at the production of intangible goods, such as the provision of new services to citizens, or the implementation of a network of connections between people.
With the smart cities, there is to a new myth. It is in the intelligent city that contemporary man puts all his trust and entrusts the resolution of his fears. Salvation with the help of technology, he wants to put things right, remedy a serious situation culpably caused by his behaviour, convert a hostile territory into a livable habitat became, rejecting the idea of a tragic fate, inexorable where the air, land, water are scarce or polluted.

Man wants to defend his right to create new realities. Starting from the “smart” city and the new relationships that can sprout in them, rebuilding at different scales pieces of society (smart communities) so as to interconnect clusters of smart communities, also located in distant geographical areas, but held together – as in the case of the Mediterranean Museum System Design and Applied Arts – by the common thread of a creative and productive culture welded to tradition and local excellence.

GAMBARDELLA C, SIEGEMUND J (2013). Smart communities and local company museums: two new concepts for the Mediterranean Museum System of Design and Applied Arts. In: HERITAGE ARCHITECTURE LANDESIGN focus on CONSERVATION REGENERATION INNOVATION Le vie dei Mercanti _ XI Forum Internazionale di Studi. p. 988-998, Napoli:La scuola di Pitagora editrice, ISBN: 978-88-6542-290-8, Aversa – Capri, 13/15 Giugno).