Human Smart Cities are those where governments engage citizens by being open to be engaged by citizens, supporting the co-design of technical and social innovation processes through a peer-to-peer relationship based on reciprocal trust and collaboration. The Human Smart City is a city where people – citizens and communities – are the main actors of urban “smartness”. A Human Smart City adopts services that are born from people’s real needs and have been co-designed through interactive, dialogic, and collaborative processes.

In a Human Smart City, people are not obliged to adopt technologies that have been selected and purchased by their municipal governments; they rather are encouraged to compose their own services using available technologies in simple, often frugal solutions. Co-creation initiatives at the heart of the Human Smart City concept also stimulate local development, creating new business models and new apps, products, services and solutions. Indeed, the solutions for the big challenges of our time require not only innovative technologies but, above all, mass behaviour transformation of the kind that can only be achieved through the involvement of people. Through the appropriate governance of social and technical innovation and the integration of Future Internet technologies, Living Labs and Social Innovation, the Human Smart Cities vision aims to build on a new sense of belonging and identity, wellbeing and community, to shape a better and happier society.