Smart Citizenship: designing the interaction between citizens and smart cities

Fostering Smart Citizens: The Role of Public Libraries in Smart City Development

“…Views on smart citizens also underscore different aspects but coincide with a shift in the government's approach towards placing citizens as smart citizens at the center of a smart city so that its development is citizen-driven and bottom-up, which contrasts but can complement expert-led, top-down models [6,20,25,40,41,57,76,89,134,143]. Studies thus often discuss the importance of smart citizens for the community, government, and society.…”

“…One more significant publication based on a series of essays by thought leaders posits that smart citizens are individuals who take responsibility for their community and use technology to participate in public affairs and collectively create better solutions to urban problems [118]. Such participation and agency are often realized through new ways of connecting, interacting, and learning with other stakeholders to prioritize, design, and implement smart city initiatives, ensuring their value for money, effectiveness, and wide adoption [7,10,40,63,74,[115][116][117] as well as the co-creation of socially oriented innovations [20,[67][68][69][118][119][120]. This co-creation includes innovations conceived, tested, or fabricated by smart citizens using various ad-vanced tools and resources, often in dedicated experimental spaces such as makerspaces, fablabs, or living labs [20,40,44,49,70,74,121,122].…”

“…To promote citizen participation, governments-often partnering with non-profits and knowledge institutions-can also initiate smart citizen-led technology and data projects (e.g., urban sensing efforts) and events such as prototyping experiments and hackathons [41,43,47,118,143]. Such partnerships are also important because non-profits operate at the grassroots and can facilitate smart citizens-government-business interactions on smart city initiatives [40,70].…”

“…However, the most commonly recognized collaborators are more traditional actors such as technology companies, governments, and knowledge institutions [4,23,29,31,[37][38][39]. In several more comprehensive studies, citizens are also acknowledged as salient collaborators who, instead of playing passive roles, become active actors in realizing smart cities [1,7,9,19,36,[40][41][42][43][44][45]]. Yet, some scholars posit that citizen engagement and power have been limited in technocratic, top-down agendas driving smart cities and advocate for a more citizen-centric, context-aware, and bottom-up focus, in which smart cities are built for and with citizens [24,25,38,40,42,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54].…”

“…This discourse centers around the concept of a "smart citizen", which is considered the benchmark for citizen agency in the smart city agenda [20,49,[55][56][57]. Smart citizens are generally defined as individuals empowered by technology and information to have a say in and evaluate decisions directly related to making their cities smart and sustainable [7,17,21,35,40,[58][59][60][61][62]. Smart citizens can be integral to the success of smart cities as their active participation can ensure that smart city initiatives are designed and implemented in alignment with real needs and aspirations, which can foster more inclusive and responsive urban development and governance [9,24,51,[63][64][65][66].…”