From Smart–Cities to Smart-Communities.: How can we evaluate the impacts of innovation and inclusive processes in urban context?

Nowadays through ICT supports and their applications, the concept of Smart Cities has evolved into Smart Communities, where the collaborative relationship between citizens and public administration generates multi-dimensional impacts: urban sites are living labs and agents of innovation and inclusion. As a first step, this paper aims to critically review the state of the art of the assessment methods of these impacts through a set of synthetic indicators; the second step is to elaborate a specific framework to evaluate quality of life through a set of impact indicators for smart communities and inclusive urban processes. According to Giffinger et al. (2007) and Giffinger & Haindl (2009), cities and communities are smart if they perform well in six smart categories: smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living. Considering a recent experiment carried out in Turin (Italy), the Authors propose a methodology, whose trial is ongoing, based on a Hierarchical Multiscale Framework defining a set of smart communities’ indicators.