Our concept of urban sustainability is changing along with our evolving modern society. It is related\ud to a number of factors that have an impact on our current understanding of the concept of an urban\ud system. Referring to a systemic approach to understanding the urban system, we can consider urban\ud sustainability as the opposite of urban entropy, which represents both the “dark side of the urban system”\ud and the negative component of each urban subsystem. Within these subsystems, we can identify\ud some driving functions that play an important role in urban sustainability. Nevertheless, when these\ud functions exceed the threshold of urban load, urban entropy increases exponentially. Starting with the\ud very recent changes in urban entropy (as well as urban sustainability) and by assuming that the negative\ud components of the urban system are connected to urban risks, two types of urban entropies can be\ud defined: endogenous and exogenous. The first relates to internal conditions of urban subsystems which\ud unplanned urban management can generate. The second one relates to external causes: natural and\ud anthropic. Within this framework, tourism can be considered as one of the urban functions affecting the\ud organizational process of an urban system. Tourism depends on internal factors and grows by generating\ud exogenous flows. In many cases, tourism plays a fundamental role in an urban economy and it acts\ud as a strategic factor for urban competitiveness. When tourism exceeds urban capacity, it causes urban\ud malfunctions. In this sense, tourism is one of the most sensitive urban functions regarding the process\ud of entropy. Using the systemic approach as a theoretical reference, this paper states that tourism can act\ud as a driving function able to shift the urban system towards sustainable condition if it is integrated into\ud the process of town planning

The attention to sustainable urban development, participated urban planning, the consideration of territory as non renewable resource, sustainable mobility and so on has been characterizing also the investigation in the field of urban and regional sciences. Moving from these assumptions the paper seeks to codify a new process of sustainable town planing which is able to indicate the real actions to operate on the city. This paper intends to describe this new process called: Ecotownplanning starting from the systemic approach to the city. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part aims to build the background by placing the contribution inside the debate on global change, in particular as regards the issue of entropy. Tthe second part points out that one of the strategic factors to trigger the change may be to rebuild the social capital within cities. Finally, concrete actions are proposed for urban planning (Ecotownplanning) that can help recover the operational condition of sustainable urban development

It is quite difficult to define what the Smart City is: some studies try to understand urban smartness by considering a set of variables inside the...