Complexity, governance and the smart city

The city is today object of scientific interest around the concept of environmental complexity. Its multiformity is an element of richness on which cities base opportunities and raison d'être, thus making it necessary their protection and enhancement, through administrative and managerial actions able to replicate rather than reduce this complex articulation. Yet the inclusive and diffuse management of the vital characters of a city includes explicit or tacit agent/environment relationships. Technology becomes critical support towards intelligent systems for structuring the problems posed by the intricacy, fuzziness and dynamical uncertainty of complex environments -particularly urban settlements. Urban organization becomes a smart city by overcoming prejudices that evoke presumed enhancing mechanisms induced by diffused infrastructuring per se. The cognitive management of the characters and features involved in the formation and organization of the smart city certainly needs adequate architectures, homotetically related to such complexity. An ontology-based approach is proposed here, as an opportunity for analysing and managing this multimensional cognitive assortment, looking for suitable formalization models beyond reductionist smart city commonplaces.