My Smart Quartier Erasmus Project

Project Title

My Smart Quartier

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

In less than 20 years, digital technology has actively participated in the transformation of our society. Employment, training, consumption and production are being reconfigured, directly and indirectly, through digital technology.
According to the OECD: “Some studies place the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution at the forefront of their explanation of inequalities.”Digital technologies are constantly evolving and will call for a recurring learning effort for everyone throughout life. Digital technology can serve a more equitable, more just, more united, more participatory society as long as we think of the conditions. Access to terminals and the Internet to which it most often refers is a necessary condition for e‐inclusion, but not a sufficient condition – and it is not necessarily the most difficult condition to meet!
The health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has further revealed the dependence of our societies on digital tools. Here again, the situation reveals glaring inequalities that are impossible to ignore. The stability of our modern societies is at stake.
The objective of My Smart Quartier (MSQ) is to think of digital as a medium to reinvent collective and contributory forms to work together on the emergence of avenues for real inclusion via digital. The project proposes to design training tools for social action professionals: facilitators, mediators, technicians in order to equip them with the skills to intervene with the target audience: people who are the most distanced from digital technology and who cannot integrate these new requirements and uses. It is about working on the facilitator’s perspective but also the place of digital mediation relative to the actors of the City Policy in particular, or citizen action. These training tools are anchored in basic knowledge (techniques, protocols) but also, and above all, on the mobilisation capacities, facilitation, active pedagogies, creativity to adapt scenarios, means and methods for facilitation.
The project is based on an open partnership involving four countries: France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It is singular in its balance between private and public actors: the consulting firm ESC2 is the lead partner accompanied by the AAGESC social center, the City of Salon de Provence, the Conselho de Moura Development Agency (ADC Moura) and the Universities of the Politecnico de Torino and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.
Through four intellectual productions and four learning mobility, these representatives of local communities, associations and researchers were able together to develop a comprehensive analysis. Based on the inventory of the situation in the partner countries, it leads to a precise definition of needs and uses. From these persona (typical profile), a methodological pedagogical guide was developed to be tested in the project’s experimental areas: The Canourgues district in Salon de Provence, Sete e meio in Moura, las Poblats maritims in Valencia and Mirafiori in Torino.
Ultimately, nearly 2000 people were involved in the project at these different steps. The results are mainly reflected through the media educational “digital illiteracy” that complement the training standards in direction of digital mediators. With this tool, all social action professionals are able to provide a digital mediation that is unavoidable for every local development project. The guide “digital and citizen mediation space” describes the advances made possible by the techniques of active pedagogy and creativity.
The impacts and benefits are numerous for all the project partners. In France, the achievements of My Smart Quartier will feed the Plan “the digital Factory” of the Metropolis of Aix Marseille Provence, one of the major axes of which involves the training of one thousand digital mediators and professional intermediaries in priority neighborhoods. In Portugal, the tools and methods developed will allow the establishment of a participatory budget process within the Municipality of Moura, ensuring the integration process, the participation and vote of all categories of the population. In Italy, the crowdmapping platform, MIRAMAP has been able to evolve to bring the most vulnerable populations to understand and contribute to the process that the City of Torino is carrying out with POLITO. At Valencia, associations of residents of priority neighborhoods and associations for integration of women such as Eco-inventame have introduced the digital field into their participatory practices.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 264879 Eur

Project Coordinator

ESC2 ASSOCIES & Country: FR

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE VALENCIA
• Mairie de Salon de Provence (city)
• Association pour l’Animation et la Gestion des Equipements Sociaux des canourgues
• POLITECNICO DI TORINO
• Associação para o Desenvolvimento do Concelho de Moura