This article investigates the variegated urbanization of technology-based economies through the lenses of a comparative analysis looking at New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Over the last decade, the former has gained a reputation as a 'model tech city' at the global level, while the latter is an example of emerging 'start-up city'. Using a Marxist-Foucauldian approach, the article argues that, while technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s arose from the late Keynesian state, the globally hegemonic phenomenon of start-up urbanism is illustrative of an increasingly decentralized neoliberal project of self-governing 'enterprise society', mobilizing ideas of community, cooperation and horizontality within a context of cognitive-communicative capitalism in which urban environments acquire renewed centrality. In doing so, the article underlines start-up urbanism's key contribution to the reinvention of the culture of global capitalism in times of perceived economic shrinkage worldwide and the central role played by major metropolitan centres in this respect.

This article offers an initial exploratory analysis of some promising agents and innovative practices for a long-term strategy of sustainable, inclusive and smart territorial development for peripheral areas in the Etna macro-region. It aims to scrutinize the potential role of tourism and local entrepreneurship with a view to implementing a territorial approach to a smart specialization strategy. Mostly based on statistical analysis and a critical review of literature, the paper gives an overview on strengths and weaknesses of some existing rural cluster initiatives of innovation, which are of interest to implementing a tourism-centred smart specialization that aims to combine tourism diversification and sustainable development. Both the promising and problematic side of the concept of smart specialization are discussed and some policy implications for realizing tourism innovation in accordance with the need to draw up an alternative policy agenda for the development of peripheral areas are suggested.

This chapter debates the competing approaches of the smart city model. It starts by critically discussing top-down approaches, focusing on influence of neoliberal urban experimentation, the role of dominant social interests, the reduction of the city and of urban citizenship, and the risks linked with its uncritical assumption. Then, attention shifts on counter-geographies of digital urbanism drawn from below by citizens, communities, and social movements, as part of a fragmented landscape of activism engaged in building alternative and bottom-up approaches of the smart city. Making use of the case study of a city in southern Italy, Catania, the aim of the chapter is threefold since it discusses the critical aspects linked with dissemination of smart city model as a means for investigating the evolutionary neoliberalization developed in southern Italy during last decades, the influence of neoliberal scripts of urban planning on policy practices, and then the potential alternative activities of digital urbanism hold for a more human-centered and socially embedded smart city.

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This article presents an analysis of the presence in, and use of, the web by some forms of digital citizenry in a city of southern Italy: Catania. Its primary aim is to analyze how, also in a weak civil society, information and communication technologies (ICTs) create new opportunities for extending public sphere and for learning new modes of participatory local action for sustainable urban development. The local experiences presented in this research indicate that ICTs can facilitate a redistribution of local social powers, offering infrastructures and tools useful for implementing a continuous process of social interaction, exchange of knowledge and the development of practices, influencing policy processes and planning models.