Towards a social approach to digital cities

The paper discusses the strategy followed in a digital cities project named Gaia Digital. This project is an ongoing threeyear project sponsored by the Portugal Digital Initiative, within the Information Society operation program framework. It provides a digital city counterpart for Vila Nova de Gaia, a Portuguese town with around 288.000 inhabitants, considering 2001 figures. The Gaia Digital project is focused in offering an environment to increase involvement of the local population and other people interacting with Gaia related and/or based activities. As a result, Gaia Digital adopts a social approach to the digital cities concept where technology follows information needs and information just exists to support people interaction. The Gaia Dig ital lemma is "Digital Gaia, a cup of ideas". This reinforces the role that innovation (both technology and its applications) and people participation may have in all aspects of the Gaia Digital project. The paper defends the need to have a social approach when considering digital cities, in order to define a strategy that takes advantage of people and not of current or prospective technology potential