City as a Service

In these recent years the extraordinary revolution made by Information Technology and Service Design has brought people interactions to a new level in terms of speed and complexity.

Today, almost everywhere in the world, with an internet connection, a cheap device and the right app we can do such incredible things and change deeply the way we live our life.

These new communication tools have an enormous potential but in PUSH we think there is much more behind buzz words as "smart" and “startups". With the right mix of creativity and technology, indeed, it's possible to effectively improve people life, environmental sustainability and thus the future of our habitat: the cities.

Improving urban contexts' sustainability is the biggest challenge of our generation. And, most of all, we cannot fail.

In PUSH we’ve thought that we could try to improve cities' liveability with technology driven bottom-up projects, by simply rethinking and redesign some of the complex processes of being citizens.

Using the urban metabolism metaphor, in order to improve the body performance we thought more interesting to operate upon the nervous system i.e. people that often “use” the its body improperly.

In marginal cities' contexts, with few money and little political transparency, this approach makes a lot of sense because it’s faster, leaner and has many measurable metrics.

Mission of our innovation lab is to demonstrate that in such territory the combination of IT and Service Design can trigger bigger and more cost-effective transformations than years and years of expensive top-down policies.

The sustainable development of future cities is definitely up to us.

With this perspective about the cities' future, lately, we’ve raised the interest of the World Urban Campaign and in October we will host in Palermo an Urban Thinker Campus. The event, held by different cities around the world, is promoted by the United Nations, with the aim of sensitizing and creating awareness among the citizens on urban issues, and prepare the contents to be presented during the conference Habitat III "The city we need" (Quito 2016).

So we’ve tried to condensed our view in what we've called "City as a Service”.

The idea is to think, prototype and share digital solutions that are concretely reshaping the urban space by simply modifying citizens’ services, the “citizens' experience".

Two different moments will compose "City as a Service": a nine days Intensive School for 30 international students in Erice (25th Sept. to 3rd Oct.) and then the three days Urban Thinker Campus in Palermo (8th Oct. to 10th).

It’s already possible to apply for school scholarships and submit proposals for the Urban Thinker Campus Sessions. See you soon in Sicily!