Learning City and Smart City: a strategic integration for the development of citizens' soft skills


Abstract:

The learning city model proposed by UNESCO (UNESCO, 2015 e 2017) and the urban paradigm commonly known as smart city (Vianello, 2013), represent models whose coexistence, in a logic of mutual integrability, It can foster the development of cross-cutting skills in favour of citizenship (Andone et al., 2014) for inclusive and sustainable development (Carta, 2014). Learning cities able to foster learning through an ecosystem that includes formal, non-formal and informal education (Castoldi, 2015; Zhuang et al., 2017). The city, offering both traditional education and widespread learning spaces (Andone et al., 2014), becomes an environment of continuous and lifelong learning. At the same time, innovative technologies that facilitate access to education can be found in the smart city model (Liu, Huang & Wosinski, 2017; Badshah et al., 2023). This paper analyzes how the integration between learning cities and smart cities can promote the formation of emerging and increasingly relevant transversal skills in the labor market (Pezzoli, 2017; Zahn et al., 2024), in a logic of counteracting the unemployment of future generations.