From Smart–Cities to Smart-Communities: how can we evaluate the Performance and the Impacts of innovation and inclusive processes in urban context?

Nowadays through the ICT's support and their applications, the Smart Cities concept has evolved in Smart Communities, where the collaborative relationship between citizens and public administration generates multi-dimensional impacts: urban sites are a living lab and an agents of innovation and inclusion At a first step the paper aims at critically reviewing of state of the art on the impacts' assessment methods through a set of synthetic indicators; the second step is to elaborate a specific framework to evaluate the 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), a city and a community are smart if they have a well-performing in six characteristics: smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living. From a recent experiment carried out on the territory of South Mirafiori 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 (convergence and divergence): the Macro-scale (metropolitan scale), delineating macro-structural and strategic indicators, which weighs (both numerically and descriptively) the priority policies of innovation and inclusion; the Meso-scale (city scale), which provides a meso indicators of strategic nature on issues of medium priority, aimed at assessing the specific impact (qualitative and quantitative) on innovation and inclusion processes; the Micro-scale (district scale) where were selected indicators to assess impacts on specific projects and actions triggered by ICT, inclusion, transparency and accountability issues. Finally, the rationale of the indicators' selection process is prefigured. Nowadays through the ICT's support and their applications, the Smart Cities concept has evolved in Smart Communities, where the collaborative relationship between citizens and public administration has generated multi-dimensional impacts: in this sense, the urban sites are a living lab and an agent of innovation and inclusion At a first step the paper aims at critically reviewing of state of the art on the impacts' assessment methods through set of synthetic indicators, the second step is to elaborate a specific framework for evaluation of the 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), a city and a community are smart if have a well-performing in six characteristics: smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living. From a recent experiment carried out on the territory of South Mirafiori in Turin (Italy), the Authors propose a methodology, whose trial is ongoing, based on a Hierarchical Multiscale Framework for defining a set of indicators of smart communities (convergence and divergence): the Macro-scale (metropolitan scale), which define macro-structural and strategic indicators, which weighed (both numerically and descriptively) the priority policies of innovation and inclusion; the Meso-scale (city scale), which provides a meso indicators of strategic nature on issues of medium priority, aimed at assessing the specific impact (qualitative and quantitative) on innovation and inclusion processes; the Micro-scale (district scale) which were selected indicators to assess impacts on specific projects and actions triggered by issues of ICT, inclusion, transparency and accountability. Finally, the rationale of the indicators' selection process is prefigured.