SMARTera: a new approach for smart participation through Social Urban Networks

Active participation of citizens and community involvement are key elements in the Smart City paradigm. At the same time urban governments are growing in awareness that conscious citizen engagement is absolutely necessary to tackle effectively major challenges in urban development. In this framework new ICT-based solutions can greatly help to face the new societal challenges. In this framework "Smart Basilicata" is a research and innovation project aimed to trigger smart sectoral actions and improve citizens awareness in the Basilicata region (Southern Italy) as a diffuse smart community. To this end, one of the main goals of Smart Basilicata is the implementation of a Social Urban Network (SUN) which represents a new approach to smart participation expressly designed for the City of Matera, Awarded European Capital of Culture 2019, in order to enhance the involvement of the whole community. The SUN is a new ICT-tool which works both as an aggregator of experience and incubator of all the cultural processes that take place in the city. The final aim is to strengthen social cohesion mainly through the enhancement of community identity (e.g. history and memory emersion, cultural heritage and intangibles goods valorisation) as well as creative capacity, acting as a facilitator for tourists and citizens. This paper focuses on an in-depth analysis carried out in the local community, aimed at providing the basis of knowledge on which the SUN for Matera will be established. First, the paper describes a short survey, conducted in January 2014, which was based on an innovative and integrative method based on direct interviews of citizens, stakeholders and tourists carried out by a multidisciplinary staff. In this step the main aim was to collect deep needs, requirements and wishes of individuals in order to support the preliminary phases of conceiving, designing and implementing the SUN contents and functions. The innovative methodology adopted for the survey, based on a argumentative and participative approach, aims at overcoming the limit of traditional research and socio-anthropology reportages, experimenting a multitasking approach that can to enhance individual freedom, capacities and possibilities. The results show that the implementation of a SUN as a tool to support effectively a smart community, call for a multilayer structure to produce integrated information that valorize all knowledge assets and allow to share easily new ideas arising from the local community.