Adaptive Learning in Smart Cities – The cases of Catania and Helsinki
Adjunct professor, PhD Ilpo Laitinen, City of Helsinki. Finland. [email protected]
Professor Roberta Piazza, University of Catania. Italy. [email protected]
Professor Jari Stenvall, University of Tampere. Finland. [email protected]
Smart city has been in discussions and became fashionable especially after 2010. The
smart city concept is typically based on six focus areas: smart economy, smart mobility,
smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance. Learning is a
dimension that is becoming more central within smart city discussions although it has
not been yet adequately studied as key process in the SC development. .
Our study concentrates on the issue of challenges for adaptive learning within smart
cities. Adaptive Something about analysis of the learning processes involved in
Dreyfus’s competence acquisition model ? learning emphasizes that learning occurs
through people interacting in context, or more specifically, in multiple contexts.
Our research is a comparative qualitative study. The material has been gathered from the
cities of Helsinki and Catania. The research techniques include document analysis, faceto-face interviews, and focus groups. The first insights about the SC concept were
gained in 2015 with an in-depth interview and two focus groups (12 people) in the City
of Helsinki and, in 2016, in-depth interviews and a focus group in the city of Catania
with 11 experts.
Our starting point is that the learning patterns of a smart city highly depend on its local
context factors. In practice, there are some clear distinctions between Helsinki and
Catania. Firstly, it seems that the dominant smart city discursion in Catania is more
characterised by historical push than in Helsinki, where the dominant discursion is more
based on future pull. In Catania, interviewees referred to history and cultural heritage
clearly and notably more often than in Helsinki. The history-dominant discursion leads
to view development through an incremental process rather than a system-wide change
Secondly, the importance given to learning processes in the development of the SC
differs. Self-directed learning processes are not always adequately recognized and
emphasized in the workplace; more often the vision is anchored to the importance of
training activities and expert guides. .
Due to the cities’ contexts we concentrate our article on what the differences between a
closed system (Catania) and an open system (Helsinki) are in adaptive learning in smart
cities.
The paper is work in progress.
Key words: Smart city, adaptive larning.