Urban and Digital Agenda: Opportunities for Socio-digital Innovation

In the framework of the EU-level debate on the link between Urban and Digital we highlight some possible misinterpretations to be avoided when transferring these reflections into regulations and guidelines at the level of the Italian Urban Agenda. In particular, we propose a new way to look at cities, free from the constraints of the mainstream urban and planning theory, which takes them as real-life experimental laboratories for reconceiving city making and the concept of digital innovation itself. This latter intended as real, radical change, not simply assured by the ICT endowment of smart cities and communities, but also requiring the enabling of lively and collaborative learning environments, whereby new socio-digital infrastructures are built on the top of new forms of governance, participation and democracy. Out of the simple superimposing of a technological layer to the existing physical (or communitarian) one, but rather through the exploration of a number of possible development opportunities emerging from collective learning in Smart Cities, consistently with a conception of urban environments as immense and promising laboratories, where innovation is co-created and the immanent intelligence of the urban is revealed by ICT, rather than installed or simply ICT-enabled. And, last but not least, where a renovated perspective of sustainability focuses on longer-term social revenues from innovation policy, according to a much broader perspective, although however profitable, than that one of shorter-range yields of accruals in urban infrastructure