The Humanification of the Urban Community: An Italian Smart District Experience

Exploring Humanification

Sustainable transitions require changes that can occur in small local experiments, in which evident elements are highlighted as scalable and through which networks can be developed into new movements so to rewrite a sustainable culture for the future (Schlaile and Urmetzer, 2019). This process requires a new regenerative culture of the sustainable knowledge no longer based on ‘managers’ versus ‘managed’ but a new way to co-produce a useful knowledge for everyone. Recent approaches consider this concept as a mixture between subject and object of sustainability suggesting that a low level of cultural influence might conditions the very co-creation of knowledge (Dessein et al., 2015b). This interpretation implies that when sustainable cities and communities is a goal, the role of the managers is those to create the space that allows the interplay between the subject and the object (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). This interplay is here understood as a process of humanification beyond cultural automatisms, in a similar way Bergson (2002) calls “thinking beyond the human condition”, as “we are not simply creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a creative evolution of becoming”. In that sense, humanification concerns a learning behavior before a culture sharing, it is “a condition for anthropogenesis” (Ingold, 2013).