Expected Participation and Mentality of Smart Citizen in Smart Cities

Abstract

The purpose is to investigate the expected participation and mentality of smart citizens in smart cities. The key question is the role of the human factor in smart environments globally studied through a research corpus of 150 documents including mainstream summaries trend reports, white papers and visions of business -governmental -university research co-operations reaching a wide audience of the subject. Foremost, a short review of the changing scholarly trends is presented as a theoretical framework. Concerning its key ideas, the corpus based findings are recapped and analysed by content networks and the most referred city strategies. Besides, a critical approach reveal further required factors and risks to investigate. The ultimate goal is to understand how the smart city landscape is shaped by citizen-based strategies, open data, empowerment and responsibility. Accordingly, the paper closes with further considerations regarding the importance of anonymous open data, advantages of neighbourhood-based implementations, aspects of permanent and temporary citizen-engagements, interpretation of metaphors or upcoming technologies, and also, privacy and ethical issues. The results provide the policy development and the emerging scholarly interest with a framework study.

Profiling Citizens in the Smart City: A Quantitative Study in Wallonia

“…Now that we have a better understanding of "who" are the potential participants in the smart city, another avenue that could be further explored is "how" they can actually participate. Although citizens are now recognized as key participants in the smart city, few articles inform us about how to implement a participatory approach in this particular context [7,8,46]. Moreover, citizens are not yet sufficiently involved in the evaluation of participatory processes.…”

“…Both in theory and practice, the place of the citizens in smart city dynamics is largely discussed. On the one hand, several authors attest that the citizens' perspective has long been neglected in favor of technological, political, or academic perspectives [7][8][9]. This expert-led and technocentric approach quickly proved itself to be questionable, especially in Western cities, since citizens have the power to reject imposed solutions and technologies [4].…”