Cities transformations, social innovation and service design

Cities are nowadays facing disruptive challenges calling for smarter solutions and creating pressure for the public and the private sectors to deliver innovative services better responding to the needs of citizens. Great expectations are put in the Smart City paradigm, but most of the solutions just rely on technologies and are thus far from the urban functioning, people and their daily life. In this framework design is orienting its theories and practices towards a different paradigm, putting people at the centre of the smartness of cities by recognizing the need of developing sustainable, micro and contextualized solutions that can be subsequently scaled up to achieve larger social impacts (Murray, Caulier-Grice and Mulgan, 2010). The Human Smart City paradigm (Concilio, Deserti and Rizzo, 2014) relies on the capability of the city to realize and scale up intangible infrastructures based human and non human assemplies (Enh, 2008); on new typologies of partnerships for the development of services. The paper presents this vision by discussing the results of MyNeighborhood, a European project that is experimenting the HSC paradigm in 4 different European neighbourhoods.