Smart Neighbourhood Learning - the case of MyNeighbourhood

Smart Cities have often been associated with an extensive ICT infrastructure supporting citizens to learn. A Human Smart City focuses on its citizens and the human infrastructure they create being key actors of city making processes with a special attention on service design, development and delivery. A Human Smart City leverages technology to enhance citizen engagement and social innovation, thus activating learning processes driven by the experimental nature of smart solutions’ design process. In this paper, we describe the case of MyNeighbourhood, an European project centred on the concept of Human Smart Cities and aimed at engaging neighbourhoods within four pilot cities. Four European municipalities engaged with their citizens to co-design services and foster a sense of identity and ownership in their neighbourhoods. The project focussed on sharing experiences across the neighbourhoods and the pilots with the aim of learning from each other. The experiences from this project show learning processes at different levels: individuals, groups and, in some cases, institutional. The focus of this paper is on neighbourhoods and cities that learn and innovate and on the opportunities and implications for cities.