Energy sustainability and social empowerment: the case of Centocelle smart community co-creation

Abstract

Currently, one of Italy’s major institutional challenges in the field of integrated sustainability is to further develop the local governance capacities in order to facilitate the energy transition; this aspect, which, up to now, had to answer for the poor adoption of technologies, can be solved through the socio-environmental-energy nexus, through open innovation processes and participatory approach. This paper investigates a series of technological, social, economic and community empowering interventions on the Centocelle district of Rome; interventions such as social-web, smart labs, living labs, circular economy practices symbiotically work to exploit the socio-environmental-energy nexus. The research focuses both on the model created and on how all the different components work together in order to let the social become the projection of the process of energetic, environmental and economic sustainability. New social organizations, such as the Community Cooperative of Centocelle neighborhood, are going to perform a new kind of governance supporting and validating a new community system.