聚居 - jùjū : an enabling solution to guarantee digital inclusion in the perspective of the smart city

Shanghai is a modern environment in which smart technologies, innovative services and fast way of living coexist with tradition, local habits and slow living; moreover, it is the Chinese metropolis with the most open mind, in which East & West have found the right balance, providing opportunities and enabling solutions that satisfy any taste. The recent event of Expo 2010 gave a huge contribution to this transformation, accelerating noteworthy the development of the city and providing to its inhabitant a better quality of life. In spite of this, the rapidity in which this changes happened has created an unbalance that brings out the existing gap between different social groups and areas of the urban grid. Often, what progress and technology try to solve and improve, generates unexpected and latent problems. Social inclusion, quality of life, hygienic conditions, accessibility to services and spaces have been improved from the latest urban reform, but we should not get blind by the glittering of modern districts and the impressiveness of their buildings. China has changed his face rapidly in the last decades, with a velocity that no one Country in the west side of the world can compare.This recent transformation was only the starting point of a bigger one that is going to happen in the next five years. The Shanghai Digital City project, that started three years ago, and that counts on the adoption of latest technologies to provide to Shanghainese innovative services.This project is the forerunner of another impressive change that will happen in 2015. What citizens got from this transformation is undoubtedly the sign of the progress; this change was necessary to make livable a metropolis as Shanghai that presently hosts 20 million of inhabitants. In vision of the Shanghai Smart City project, I have decided to investigate over a series of topics that are related to its realization and over the effects that it will have on the users both before and during its implementation. The aim is to understand if the users are ready to this umpteenth change that, more than the ones which happened previously,will have a great fallout on their lives, enlarging their vision of the city and influencing the way they perceive and interact with it. The data collected during the research phase have been analyzed, interpreted and organized in order to find design opportunities useful to develop an output along the design activity. The final outcome is a strategic solution based on a web platform.The aim to deliver to citizens an enabling solution that can guarantee social inclusion in the perspective of the Smart City.