Co-creating Urban Development: a Living Lab for Community Regeneration in the Second District of Palermo

The characterisation of urban ‘smartness’ emerges as a product of social mobilisation, which marks the pathway towards collective technology adoption and policy innovation. This paper highlights the didactic and critical aspects that relate to the use of participatory solutions – namely the electronic Town Meeting and others, such as weblogs and the “Planning for Real” scheme – which start within the dimension of social animation and serious gaming and are only later oriented to urban planning. The Palermo pilot of the PARTERRE ICT-PSP project, based on the Territorial Living Lab approach, documents one possible transition from the stage of a free relationship with scenarios and visions, to the definition of a social demand for planning, specifically within the framework of a real experience of the citizenship life. From a policy making perspective, Participation in planning does not come to an end but continuously tends to a gradual improvement, both in the quality of the projects and in those cohesion factors, which lead to the constitution of spontaneous partnerships