Smart City Participation: Dream or Reality? A Comparison of Participatory Strategies from Hamburg, Berlin & Enschede

Abstract

Urbanization is forcing local government to revisit their way of communicating with citizens. By using Information Technology, cities can become smarter, more livable and more sustainable. The purpose of this study is to identify critical success factors for local government regarding smart city strategy and participation. The literature study consists of concepts such as smart city, participation and digital strategy. The qualitative study shows that the city of Hamburg defined a digital vision while the other two cities lacked setting such strategies. Bottom-up planning was their primary approach for smart city activities. Regarding the topic of participation we recognize that Hamburg can be recognized as a best practice example. Although the participatory practices were still in its infancy, they showed promising results. Remarkably, all three cities stress the importance of collaboration of different types of stakeholders. The quadruple helix structure ensures effective participation of citizens, companies, universities and government.

Artificial Intelligence in the Urban Environment: Smart Cities as Models for Developing Innovation and Sustainability

“…We also evaluated each item on the integrated dashboard on a scale from 1 to 6 (two items were eliminated due to unavailability of relevant information on some cities analyzed-citizen-government channels and public services for people with limited mobility-ultimately leaving 40 items). The data are obtained from different public sources available to citizens, such as the various cities' City Councils, open data published by the Spanish government, the official webpages of regional governments, local newspapers, and the Andalusian Multiterritorial Information System (SIMA) [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62]. If the city is successful in each field (for example, obtains a 6 in all fields), it can obtain a maximum of 240 points.…”

“…Other cities, such as Hamburg and Bergen [58,59], have developed projects to remedy the deficiencies detected: projects which are currently global models of urban efficiency. In the case of Spain, a study by the University of Navarre [59] showed the world ranking of various Spanish cities (Figure 5.)…”

“…Starting from real data from different sources [46,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62], we have created an integrated dashboard and applied it to the specific case of Granada, identifying 23 deficient indicators, so that different measures supported by technological innovation and AI can help the city to improve its level of Smartness in the national landscape. Other indicators can be analyzed in the future, and the study could be expanded to assess more cases at the national and international levels.…”

Nutzer, Sammler, Entscheidungsträger? Arten der Bürgerbeteiligung in Smart Cities

“…In einer passiven Rolle kann zudem Citizen Sensing genutzt werden, um auf Grundlage der so erhobenen Daten politische Entscheidungen, zum Beispiel im Straßenbau zur Verbesserung der Verkehrsführung, zu treffen. BürgerInnen dienen in vielen Fällen primär als Informationsquelle, beispielsweise für Smartphone-Umfragen der Stadt Hamburg (Spil et al 2017) (Hosio et al 2014).…”

Urban planning: integrating smart applications to promote community engagement

“…The rise of Web 2.0 and social media through the last years has significantly transformed the way people communicate with each other (Münster et al., 2017; Spil et al., 2017; Grenier and Kudo, 2016; Stratigea, 2015; Kubicek, 2010). This change concerns mainly the supplementary function of communication through new technologies and, in contrast with what utopians and distopians say, is not characterized solely from positive or negative impacts, respectively (Wellman et al., 2001) (Wellman et al., 2001).…”