# A Point of View on New Education for Smart Citizenship
## 3 Being a Citizen in a Smart and Complex Environment  
Complex networks have strong implications in many domains, and there are many cases in which recognizing a system as such (from information, to epidemiology, to social systems, to communities) allows for having a deeper insight into its properties, potentialities, and behaviors [21], empowering, in this way, citizens' awareness. Adopting a network and complexity perspective for reflecting on citizenship may provide new insights in modern societies.  
Citizenship has been one main narrative in describing construction strategies of political and social arrangements in modern societies [22]: complexity may have a deep impact on this.  
After the 1949 [PERSON]'s Cambridge Lecture [23], citizenship has been theorized not only as a legal and political status, but also as a social status [24], thus gaining a multidimensional character: the expansion of individual and collective rights, in fact, is traditionally attached to the status of citizen.  
In modern societies, the process of rights claiming, which is a traditional active citizenship expression, is usually mediated by IT systems. Citizens ask for efficiency, accessibility, and performance; they demand an evolutive environment, able to recover from errors and disservices, oriented to ever-growing service provisions.  
In smart communities, therefore, persons have a two-fold citizenship experience: on one side, the level of their rights recognition is satisfied as never before, on the other, services in support of rights compliance, being IT mediated, generate complex data networks, the digital territories previously outlined. The concepts of community and citizenship are deeply involved and changed: traditionally, a community has been modeled as a political or institutional unit, a set of personal and empirical relationships, or on the basis of the geographical spaces where lives happen. Nowadays a community is also a linguistic object, in which every citizen is both author and content of different narrations. When integrated together, they form the overall information system [25; 26; 27], which, according to the complexity paradigm previously discussed, could be extraordinarily more informative than the sum of its components.  
The modern communities and citizenship dimensions previously outlined, fit very well with the smart city concept: despite the fact that the term \"smart city\" has become more and more widespread, its sense, definition and dimensions are not always clear [28; 29]. As any city may be conceived in terms of relations and territories [30], in this paper smart city will be conceptualized as a particular context, capable of learning from feedbacks and reacting to its inhabitants needs: a territory in which information is used to shape relations useful for adapting services to its stakeholders' exigencies and rights.  
Following the complex paradigm outlined above, we can see how _smartness_ falls within this frame.  
Being highly connected environments, smart cities present a network structure in which the encoded topological properties previously discussed are usually true: at what level is a citizen aware of being in a small world? Is he/she aware of the existence of a plurality of path to reach targets, information, institutions? Are citizens conscious of the existence of hubs? What kind of legitimacy do they have? In accordance with which process does a network edge become a hub?  
In this perspective, the educational proposal for smart citizenship will be advanced and discussed [31].