The objective of this research is to present a systematic analysis, in which we seek to identify the concepts of intelligent city, with the intention of recognizing the nature of this intelligence before the participation of the population. Therefore, the research associates concepts as smart cities, citizen participation and social web, identifying publications between 2012 and the first quarter of 2018 and questioning what the intelligent city is and how this concept is able to (re)organize the learning processes of the territory from the informal dynamics of the contemporary city. The qualitative analysis of the documents revealed an innumerable of definitions and related terms: smart, intelligent, ubiquitous, digital, knowledge, sustainable, crowd sourcing, innovative; structured in three types of approaches: technological focus, focus on human resources and focus on citizen-related governance from the following domains: media convergence, public and regulatory information policies, infrastructure management, real-time data mining and extraction, geographic information system, crowd computing, smart cities education, and social monitoring and control. In spite of the access to a great amount of data, we verify that the concept of intelligent city is referenced by a significant number of researches, but, in smaller number, works that present models of construction of a collective intelligence for the city. From this perspective, we identified the need to recognize technological education interventions for communication between individuals and the city. Because we believe that only through the implementation and management of techno-educommunication ecosystems will be able to promote a culture of participation.