A Case Study: Rome’s Cultural Ecosystems

Abstract

The Human Ecosystems and Digital Urban Acupuncture approaches have been used by Rome’s Public Administration to gain better understandings about the city’s cultural ecosystem, to enact public engagement directed to promoting participatory decision-making and policy-shaping processes, to foster the emergence of peer-to-peer self-organization patterns, and to create novel forms of economies. The project began in 2013 by observing the Relational Ecosystem of the city for 6 months, then opening up the information (which is still being captured and used to this day), configuring it as an Open Data source, and creating an open laboratory accessible to citizens, administrations, organizations, associations, companies, and multiple types of cultural operators, which could learn how to use the Relational Ecosystem to achieve their goals. This chapter describes this experience, its results, and the directions in which it is currently heading.