Smart City is a recent topic, but it is spreading very fast, as it is perceived like a winning strategy to cope with some severe urban problems such as traffic, pollution, energy consumption, waste treatment. Smart City ideas are the merge of some other more ancient urban policies such as digital city, green city, knowledge city. A Smart City is therefore a complex, long-term vision of a better urban area, aiming at reducing its environmental footprint and at creating better quality of life for citizens. Mobility is one of the most difficult topic to face in metropolitan large areas. It involves both environmental and economic aspects, and needs both high technologies and virtuous people behaviours. Smart Mobility is largely permeated by ICT, used in both backward and forward applications, to support the optimization of traffic fluxes, but also to collect citizens’ opinions about liveability in cities or quality of local public transport services. The aim of this paper is to analyse the Smart Mobility initiatives like part of a larger Smart City initiative portfolio, and to investigate about the role of ICT in supporting smart mobility actions, influencing their impact on the citizens’ quality of life and on the public value created for the city as a whole

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Smart cities (SCs) are a recent but emerging phenomenon, aiming at using high technology and especially information and communications technology (ICT) to implement better living conditions in large metropolises, to involve citizens in city government, and to support sustainable economic development and city attractiveness. The final goal is to improve the quality of city life for all stakeholders. Until now, SCs have been developing as bottom-up projects, bringing together smart initiatives driven by public bodies, enterprises, citizens, and not-for-profit organizations. However, to build a long-term smart strategy capable of producing better returns from investments and deciding priorities regarding each city, a comprehensive SC governance framework is needed. The aim of this paper is to collect empirical evidences regarding government structures implemented in SCs and to outline a framework for the roles of local governments, nongovernmental agencies, and administrative officials. The survey shows that no consolidated standards or best practices for governing SCs are implemented in the examined cities; however, each city applies its own governance framework. Moreover, the study reveals some interesting experiences that may be useful for involving citizens and civil society in SC governance.

In this article, the quality of web communication in nautical tourism is assessed, through an analysis of tourist ports websites. Tourist ports address their offer to a large variety of actual and potential customers (boaters, charter companies, crews, etc.), with every group having different drivers for interest in the port, variable expectations and specific needs to be satisfied. As a consequence, tourist ports should be capable of fine tuning their communication strategies and tools to the peculiarities of each group, to attract potential users, provide useful information to actual users and generally encourage loyalty toward the port itself. Websites, given their potential in reaching a wide international audience with rich and adaptable contents, play a major role in this purpose. This article puts forward an original evaluation tool to measure the quality of tourist ports websites, in terms of both quantity and value of the information provided; this tool is subsequently tested on a sample of tourist ports in Northern Sardinia (Italy), an area of great importance for nautical tourism in the Mediterranean Sea. Our work not only supports theoretical reflection about the quality of web communication in nautical tourism but also contributes practical recommendations to port managers on how to improve the quality of the port website

PurposeThe study analyses the role that open social innovation (OSI) perspective played for Fondazione Banco Alimentare Onlus (FBAO), a food bank in Italy, in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. It answers the following research question: how does a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, stimulate the adoption of OSI practices to revamp the activities of FBAO and facilitate appropriate solutions to carry out its social mission?Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a qualitative approach. It is based on a single case study.FindingsThe study shows how COVID-19 has stimulated the adoption of OSI practices to continue to meet the social mission, creating innovative projects or finding new ways to do the same things.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is based on a single case study.Practical implicationsThe paper contributes insights into the literature on OSI, examining how inbound and outbound OSI mechanisms can modify business models and increase the adaptation capacity of food banks and their effectiveness. In addition, it provides a rich context in which the social value drivers provided by OSI are studied.Originality/valueThis paper applies the OSI to a food bank to evaluate what this action mode produces for the food bank during a health crisis. Specifically, this is the first paper that studies the COVID-19 crisis response of a food bank from the OSI perspective, focusing on the inbound and outbound OSI processes that characterized the entire network of relationships.