Smart City L’Aquila: An Application of the “Infostructure” Approach to Public Urban Mobility in a Post-Disaster Context

Ever since the earthquake of April 6, 2009 hit the city of L’Aquila, Italy, the city has been facing major challenges in terms of social, physical, and economic reconstruction. The system of public urban mobility, the bus network, is no exception with its old bus fleet, non-user-friendly information, and poor scheduling. This paper argues that the public transportation system of L’Aquila could be improved towards smart mobility models without large infrastructure investment by leveraging the “infostructure” approach, digital technologies, open data, and open source software. This work presents the digitization and geo-referencing procedure, software architecture, and the web and mobile apps that have been developed to improve the information flow available to citizens and to increase the user-friendliness of the transportation system. Future research will seek to make use of the data and develop applications to perform a public transport accessibility analysis of major points of interest throughout the city.