‘Smart’ in Between People and the City

Abstract

The present paper intends to identify the cur­rent meanings of ‘smart’ in the concepts ‘smart cities’ and ‘smart people’ by debating on place identity conjoined with individual and communi­ty identity, as currently discussed in specialized literature, in some media outlets and in some of­ficial documents of specialized institutions. The study debates on the dichotomy ‘technology and/or the human factor’ starting from a general dis­cussion on technological determinism vs. the role of the social context, on possible new identities associated with the contemporary digimodernist society, and it ends with a discussion on the role of human-centered approaches in innovation processes that contribute to the construction of smart cities, which is the case of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Keywords

• smart cities
• smart people
• community and place identity
• human centeredness.