Florence is becoming increasingly technological. Evidence of this is the renewal of its interest in ''Digital Cities'', an international project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
''Digital Cities'' is a consortium of leading technological companies and various world cities, including Florence, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Boston, Amsterdam and Saragossa.
Consortium's projects The MIT project succeeds in bringing diverse qualities together those who run communication networks, those who design physical infrastructure and those who administer the cities and territories.
The partnership model between academia, businesses and institutions allow scientific research to take care of real problems and institutions to make proactive innovations.
The Florence province joined the Boston-based consortium in 2007 and has already received informative results on traffic and tourism fluctuations in the area.
The results of one of these studies was presented a few months ago in Florence by MIT researchers. It was a project to investigate tourists' behaviour one of the most chaotic and difficult subjects to cover in scientific terms.
Through date and time tags on photos uploaded onto one of the world's most popular photo management sites, it was possible to virtually reconstruct each tourist's path - which itineraries they followed, which places were most photographed, where they were just before and just after Florence, and which monuments and observation points were considered the most attractive.
Future projects:
Being a member of the Consortium allows the Florence project to commission studies and research from Digital Cities, in addition to being present in an environment that brings together the world's best in the technological services sector, confronting innovative experiences and international know-how.
The agreement, signed by province president Matteo Renzi and MIT professor and Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Laboratory, will remain in effect until the end of Renzi's administrative term.
