The challenge of equality between center and periphery
A three-year program for the animation of the Educational City of Rome and the implementation of seven Innovation Gyms in the city's suburbs: the challenge of equality between the center and the suburbs.
Our model, based on the needs of the territory, is capable of making communities active, inclusive, and responsible, fostering cultural growth and full citizenship. We start from the suburbs, which are "put at the center" of public attention by institutions and citizens, so that everyone can enjoy the right to inclusive and quality education, capable of generating significant social and cultural transformations and scalable and sustainable innovation processes.
The project creates and animates a new city ecosystem to strengthen Roma Capitale's capacity to implement social innovation interventions with targeted solutions that respond to the complexity of needs through education, training, and job opportunities as accelerators for inclusive development. We establish widespread innovation hubs to promote digital culture, create employment, retrain, experiment, and include.
We invest in schools because there is no other agency that interacts with more than 50 percent of citizens (students, teachers, administrators, staff, parents) on a daily basis, making it a crucial junction for any active land policy towards a truly "smart" city.
Specific actions are dedicated to "Social Innovation and Development" with pathways for engagement, empowerment, endorsement, and enforcement to build smart communities, so that citizens can be a resource for each other and collaboratively create solutions for all, becoming social agents of development. In digital labs, citizens challenge each other in civic development marathons and also carry out urban regeneration projects with feasibility studies and 3D-scale prototypes.
The approach we have chosen is systemic (from the production system to the education system), multi-organizational, multi-sectoral, and evolutionary. It is based on the "education for life" model, because in our vision, even a smart city continues to evolve, as a complex but unified organism, through social learning.
Communities and cities are smart in their ability to solve problems through technological solutions that facilitate information, communication, and relationships, within a local system of cooperation. Digital infrastructure is important, but especially the role of human, social, and relational capital as a combination for sustainable growth in the urban fabric. In other words, we can define an urban reality as "smart" if it is a socially inclusive city that ensures a better quality of life for all and is capable of responding effectively and flexibly to new needs. It is inhabited by "evolved" people, who learn, participate, and always and everywhere have an active civic role. It is made of places of solidarity, promotes the empowerment of people and their organizations. It is a city to be lived well.
A strategic goal is to realize distributed and widespread leadership in the city to work cooperatively for the common good.
Our smart city takes people into account in their entirety, is capable of engaging and motivating. It has "five minds," as defined by Gardner, and can also speak to Goleman's emotional intelligence. Not only is it human-centric, it is a Smart&Heart City.
