Smart City: Materials, Technology & People

For this Milan Design Week, the second appointment to reflect on the theme of the city of the future will be inaugurated by the exhibition "Smart City: Materials, Technology & People".

Conceived and organized by Material ConneXion® Italia, cured by the architect Giulio Ceppi and sponsored by the Municipality of Milan, the exhibition aims to stimulate ideas and debates on the theme of the Smart City – the smart city model we frequently talk about nowadays - taking on a new point of view: this time, in fact, the starting point are the inhabitants or "smart citizens", tomorrow’s active citizens, engines of change in the cities of the future to meet the challenges dictated by the ongoing global transformations.

The exhibition-event, on stage in the Superstudio Più area, reaches its second edition and represents the ideal continuation of the exhibition held in 2017, "New Materials for A Smart City".

One of this year’s first novelties is, certainly, the time period of the exhibition, which will be open to the public on April 16th, at the start of the Design Week, remaining open until May 12th, 2018 to also embrace the Milan Food Week, thanks to the partnership with Seeds & Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit, the first international exhibition dedicated to companies and digital startups operating in the food innovation sector.

Still on the subject of innovation, there will also be the presence of prestigious names such as PUMA and the MIT Design Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, which together present the latest innovations on research in the field of biodesign.

On the issue of circular economy, will also be presented "Meubles Plus", an installation of excellence for CONAI and the Consortia for the recycling of packaging waste, created by Yona Friedman, a renowned utopian-architect, designer and urban planner, Hungarian naturalized French citizen, who has always been involved in the world of sustainability and circular economy.

For this second edition, the “Smart City: Materials, Technology & People” exhibition’s concept has been developed starting from the analysis of the global challenges that all of us have in common as inhabitants of the same Planet: from the need for new approaches to preserve the ecosystem to revolutionary themes such as crowdfunding, sharing economy and 3D printing; from the security and protection of data and people to the need to feed the population and redesign the city-country relationship, to the management of the progressive increase in the world average age and a sustainable welfare. If the direction towards which we are going, among sensor networks and databases, energy consumption and complex infrastructures, is to become digital citizens in increasingly connected metropolises, then how do our needs and the urban scenarios in which we live evolve? The exhibition becomes a point of reference to reflect at 360° on how we will live in a not so distant future as citizens who do not respond only to external inputs, but become the protagonists of the process of collecting and sharing data.

Walking through the various expositive modules, the public will have the chance to discover material and technological solutions in the various areas that characterize the Smart Cities and within which the most significant changes take place. Starting from these reflections, the exhibition has been divided into 6 thematic areas: Advanced Building and Infrastructures, which exposes advanced building materials for infrastructures, casings and interiors as well as products for building, renovating and improving buildings and living, from acoustic lighting; Connected City, an area that offers solutions for the exchange of information, data collection and management and the new interconnected lifestyle; Smart living, Smart People, which collects ideas to improve the quality of the objects that surround us in areas such as our home, the office and outdoor spaces; Sustainable and Circular City, which focuses on technologies that work on reducing consumption, managing waste and resources with a view to circularity; Integrated Mobility which focuses on materials to support new mobility, from car / bike sharing to the revival of public transport and, finally, Food Policies and Urban Agriculture, which analyzes solutions for a more sustainable approach to nutrition and the integration of green spaces in the cities.

In parallel to "Smart City: Materials, Technology & People" and throughout its period, a series of meetings, workshops, conferences and events have been scheduled.

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