Smart Technologies, E-participation and the Right to the Territory

The chapter is finalized to scrutinize the capacity of netizens' e-participation and/or online activism to effectively influence territorial governance, by analyzing the role and the relevance of the Web in shaping new and variegated forms of “social movements” both in urban and in rural/marginal contexts trough a comparative analysis of four case studies in Italy. The main aim is to critically rethink - conceptually and politically - the intersection among sustainability, smart technologies, local communities, and the “right to the territory”, to provide new theoretical insights about bottom-up and “participative” concepts of smartness.