Smart community. A new way of being together?

The chapter aims at investigating the concept of smart community starting from the definition of the concept. It is a conceptual category increasingly used and which is complementary to other concepts currently objects of reflection such as – among others – those of smart cities and smart society. We will then try to identify the characteristics of the smart community which differentiate it from related concept, focusing, moreover, on the role played by science and technology. We will focus on the role the smart community plays within the classical categorization of the concept of community, reflecting then on the conceptual changes the idea and practice of community have known in modern times. We will finally focus on the fundamental role of social relationships in the enucleation of the differences between smart community and smart city, which are often wrongly used as synonyms or considered as deterministic consequence of one another. The chapter therefore intends to investigate the potentialities, the obstacles and the risks of the smart community, analyzed through the concepts offered by STS.