People life cycle in the compass of digital cities. Building capacities to act in the digital society as a cross-generational and intertemporal strategy

Digital transformation is deemed an extraordinarily effective catalyzer of processes of change in the societal and economic systems and, consequently, a potential effective drive for improvement in the inclusiveness featured by urban textures and cities’ governance. Alongside this narrative, the comprehensive global agenda promoting digital infrastructures and digital tools to create favorable conditions of readability, sustainability, transparency, and accountability of public services is today streamlining most of the domestic efforts made to improve the quality of life of their present – and future – citizens. However, taking equality of opportunity as the criterion against which, the quality of these efforts is assessed proves to be a shortcoming if a much more refined and sharper set of indicators is not properly integrated into the reasoning. This article sketches a potential research agenda and explores accordingly the potential of a new paradigm for a more suitable, dynamic, and fully-fledged inclusive approach in policy design and implementation. It argues that the effectiveness of the exercise of freedoms related to the fundamental rights of citizens intimately depends on the capacities and abilities that are built alongside the enactment of policies that tackle educational cleavages, cognitive fractures and barriers, and age cleavages. The article pioneers the integration of a Sen-inspired approach in the design of learning and smart cities.