Hearing the Voice of Citizens in Smart City Design: The CitiVoice Framework

Abstract

In the last few years, smart cities have attracted considerable attention because they are considered a response to the complex challenges that modern cities face. However, smart cities often do not optimally reach their objectives if the citizens, the end-users, are not involved in their design. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework to structure and evaluate citizen participation in smart cities. By means of a literature review from different research areas, the relevant enablers of citizen participation are summarized and bundled in the proposed CitiVoice framework. Then, following the design science methodology, the content and the utility of CitiVoice are validated through the application to different smart cities and through in-depth interviews with key Belgian smart city stakeholders. CitiVoice is used as an evaluation tool for several Belgian smart cities allowing drawbacks and flaws in citizens' participation to be discovered and analysed. It is also demonstrated how CitiVoice can act as a governance tool for the ongoing smart city design of Namur (Belgium) to help define the citizen participation strategy. Finally, it is used as a comparison and creativity tool to compare several cities and design new means of participation. Response to Reviewers: Dear Reviewers, We decided to include the reponse to reviewers in a separate file as a "Cover Letter".

Essential Requirements for Establishing and Operating Data Trusts

“…Requirement 5: Public and stakeholder engagement -two (2) min specs Much has been written regarding the importance of stakeholder and public engagement in data-intensive health research, and the importance of doing it well [1,34,[40][41][42][43][44][53][54][55][56][57]. From our perspective, members of the public are important data stakeholders who warrant tailored engagement in the same way that data holding organizations develop and nurture relationships with other stakeholders including governments, government agencies, hospitals, electronic medical record vendors, universities and research institutes, etc.…”

Smart urban governance: an alternative to technocratic “smartness”

“…According to the technology-driven approach, smart cities focus on the acceptance and use of technologies, and their integration into the city infrastructure, to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the city environment (Greenfield 2013 ; Batty et al 2012 ). Accordingly, policymakers and ICT suppliers are expected to come together to plan smart cities and deploy ICT-based solutions (Cardullo and Kitchin 2019 ; Simonofski et al 2019 ; Calzada and Cobo 2015 ; Shelton et al 2015 ).…”

“…In practice, however, the development of smart cities is over-reliant on the deployment of ICTs or technological infrastructures, and neglects social services of general interest (Monachesi 2020 ; Desdemoustier et al 2019 ; Simonofski et al 2019 ; Datta 2015 ). As a consequence, many smart city initiatives are criticized for their “ self-proclaiming and self-congratulatory ” notions of such smartness (Hollands 2008 , p. 62).…”

“…The failure to recognize the value of bottom-up innovation has increased social inequality (Simonofski et al 2019 ; Effing and Groot 2016 ). Although there is no doubt that ICTs can help create new knowledge and discover improved ways of governing cities, ICTs are just an enabler, not a panacea for all the problems and issues faced by cities and humankind (Joss et al 2019 ; Kummitha and Crutzen 2017 ).…”

“…Although there is no doubt that ICTs can help create new knowledge and discover improved ways of governing cities, ICTs are just an enabler, not a panacea for all the problems and issues faced by cities and humankind (Joss et al 2019 ; Kummitha and Crutzen 2017 ). Various services can be offered to citizens via ICT-augmented government systems, but not everyone in the city can benefit from those services, especially people with a low socioeconomic status and those who are marginalized or excluded in some way (e.g., refugees, migrants, asylum seekers) (Cardullo and Kitchin 2019 ; Simonofski et al 2019 ; Willis 2017 ).…”