Background

Today's models of 'Smart Cities' (SC) promise to preserve and improve the well-being of the society [1, 2] due to: i) a greater relevance assigned to environmental, intellectual and social capitals, considered as important as hard infrastructures (i.e. physical capital); ii) the exploitation of the information and communication technology (ICT) as an infrastructural backbone to influence all our behaviors and to support the improvement of all key factors contributing to the regional competitiveness: mobility, environment, people, quality of life and governance [3]. All models of SC adopt a top-down functionalist approach aimed at: i) optimizing the consumption of primary tangible and intangible resources (energy, water, materials, food, etc.); ii) saving time which is another important resource, usually associated with both money and individual freedom. To save this time a smart city needs to optimize and smooth the flows of people, goods and data.

In functionalist models, however, 'smart citizen' are considered as 'smart consumers' that must be educated to adopt rational behaviors compatible with the policies promoted by the municipalities. In this framework, mass education is typically identified with a “transfer of information” aimed at the acquisition of such rational behaviors and it is assessed primarily in terms of advanced infrastructure and related services availability (e.g. access to broad band Internet, etc.). At a higher and more specialized level, education is aimed at the training of the “best brains”, those able to produce smart ideas and solutions and it is usually benchmarked in terms of infrastructures (schools and universities) and efficiency of the “productive systems' (number of people with a university degree or a PhD) [2, 4]. And, in the next logical step, knowledge management is used in industry to get the best “knowledge” which has been developed by the people back to “the industry” to keep it there like a good and re-use it like an investment. This flow of information [6] has taken the form of a “capitalistic” stock flow.
In this scenario it is pretty obvious that a Grand Challenge is to promote the integration and fusion of the functionalist top-down vision of the Smart Cities with a more socially-oriented and inclusive bottom-up vision driven by a 'person centered in place' design approach, supporting the harmonious and continuous development of all experiential dimensions relevant to individuals and to the contexts of reference [5]; an approach within which the 'smart learning' (see next paragraphs) is taken as one of the driving force of the “smartness” and well being of a community. Smartness, in fact, from a learning perspective, exists both in the ambient data collected in a smart city, and among the various communities of practice and interest that exist within a city.

 

[1] S. Ho Lee, J. Hoon Han, Y. Taik Leem, and T. Yigitcanlar, 'Towards ubiquitous city: concept, planning, and experiences in the Republic of Korea,' Knowledge-Based Urban Development: Planning and Applications in the Information Era, pp. 148-169, 2008.
[2] R. Giffinger, H. Gudrun, “Smart cities ranking: an effective instrument for the positioning of cities?”, ACE: Architecture, City & Environ. 4 (12), pp. 7–25, 2010.
[3] R. G. Hollands, “Will the real smart city please stand up?, City 12 (3), pp. 303-320 (2008)
[4] R. Giffinger, C. Fertner, H. Kramar, N. Pichler-Milanovic, E. Meijers 'Smart cities. Ranking of European medium-sized cities', http://www.smart-cities.eu/press-ressources.html retrieved on Feb. 28, 2013.
[5] C. Giovannella, “Is complexity tameble ? Toward a design for the experience in a complex world”, IxD&A, N.15, pp. 18-30, 2012.

[6] J. Gleick, “The Information”, Fourth Estate, London, UK, 2012.