Bologna Civic Networks:
A Laboratory of New Electronic Metropolitan Citizenship

by Leda Guidi (short-biography)
(Municipality of Bologna/Italy)

Key words

The "civic network" and Internet technology as a possible laboratory for the construction of the new "metropolitan citizenship". Net communication and the Bologna feenet modell. The virtual community and use of "the public sphere". Networks of services and promotion of a general sense of belonging to a metropolitan dimension. Between visibility, worldwide electronic presence, neighborhood valorization. Navigation, nomadism, the ego-divided in the global network and the new symbolic values of citizenship in the local agora. Network, right to information and access. The heritage divided and the collective intelligence. The net-like paradigm, the medium, the resources, the pubblic and the substance of the metropolis.

Abstract

The telematic Bologna is the first free civic network created by a local pubblic administration in Italy. The digital Bologna (already 10.000 citizens connected) grows at a constant rate (35 new users a day) and is transforming the IPERBOLE project from a pilot into a modell for other civic networks, be they italian or european.

The Municipality of Bologna, with this communication modell, that keeps a close eye to the year of 2000 and to the following generations, has chosen to take upon itself a not secondary role in order to guarantee the right to information, the possibility of communication for everyone and to everyone, also through the information highways and the Internet. With Iperbole the municipal administration gives free access to all of the resident inhabitants, individuals or associations, other P.A.s, no-profit bodies, to internet: e-mail, local, national and international newsgroups, free navigation among the networked resources round the world, access to the municipal databases (and to those of over 700 external information providers). Thus, an institutional investment that produces new literacy, competences, habits, new dimensions and opportunities to the global communication. In fact, the more paths to communication gets activated the more the perceptive sphere/faculty expands, the number of active users (producers not only consumers) of the places of culture and knowledge and grows together with a similar growth in the participation in decision making processes. The civic network IPERBOLE is in fact becoming one of these, thanks to the users and visitors, that together forms the multimedial patrimony and thus becomes the coauthors and "clients". To be "nodal entities" in networked communications - such as citizens, institutions, special interest groups at all levels - permits to experiment and create new public discussion spaces to modell together.

The city of Bologna that is currently changing it's institutional, territorial and political structure, going from a set of indipendent municipalities (60) to a single metropolitan entity differently organized and governed, have a need to find suitable forums in order to re-think the new profile and communicate over the transformation while it is beeing realized. This path is delicate and complex for historical, social, cultural and political reasons; it is a path in progress that touches sensibility, rooting and "localisms". The new metropolitan telematic pubblic space, a forum open to metropolitan telematic citizen's contribuitions, creativity and ideas, is actually consolidating itself as one of the best method/paradigm for these communicational processes. The push towards the cultural/informational exchange that the civic networks creates is the ideal habitat for the elaboration of a new metropolitan citizenship, born out of cognitive and communicative processes "bottom up", and not imposed by administrations and bureaucraties. The net thus assumes reorganizing and management functions (common, widespread and democratic access to information and services), but is also, and above all, the home of innovation, invention and "signification" processes (attractive and redistributive medium for the intellectual capital), and constituates thus a complete metropolitan "social sphere". The net, medium that, of vocation and technical nature, forms an "agora, candidates itself to contribute to the shaping, also emotional, of the metropolitan city and to the symbolic imagery that caracterize it: a difficult task, in the middle between the local and the global, the material and the digital, the past and the future, memory and project. The IPERBOLE laboratory, with it's 10.000 users, 15.000 hypertext pages, thousands of e-mail exchanges daily, tens of active and productive discussion groups, is already an emerging and much frequented public sphere, a paradigma of a huge open workplace, hold together by the senders and recipients that incessantly inverts roles - especially within the discussion groups, but also in the production of web pages of the "information providers" - and where roles are not rigidly defined, given once and for all. On the net, and especially on a local civic network, you can see to the maximum degree the negotiative caracter of signification (give shared meanings to new "object" as metropolitan city) the interpretative cooperation; both of wich are absolutely functional and very well adapted to interactive communication on and for the metropolitan city.