Thinking Smart City with a Focus on Emerging Identity Elements

In this paper we agree that the identity of a city is continuously redefined by emergent properties expressed through environmental transformation. So we identify and emphasize some elements that may help designers to appropriately consider the continuously changing state of a city. After the exploration and identification of codes and languages derived from collective actions, we identify and illustrate three examples in order to sustain our thesis: the re-semantization of specific city elements, the boundary conditions as source of system change, and the unconventional social behaviors as lurking soft protests. We conclude by sustaining that the knitting of the “traces” of the emergent properties is a precondition for the smart city design.