Territorial smartness and the relevance of the learning ecosystems

Urban environments are composed by cities and citizens but presently benchmarking approaches - even the standardized ones - consider only the first of these two components and identify the smartness of a city with the efficacy and the effectiveness of infrastructures and processes to optimize consumptions and productive chains. Beyond the statistical problems that affects such top-down benchmarking approaches, they do not represent the citizens’ perception of what a smart city should be and, among the rest, almost fully neglect the actual relevance that a pillar like education has for social innovation and territorial development. Because of this we present an alternative definition of smartness, based on the concept of “flow”, and a related bottom-up benchmarking framework that can be applied to learning ecosystems and, more in general, to the any sort of territory.