Activity types, thematic domains, and stakeholder constellations: explaining civil society involvement in Amsterdam’s smart city

Abstract

ABSTRACT Smart city development increasingly involves civil society stakeholders (CSS) because they constitute legitimate stakeholders concerning digitalized urban public goods. As users, however, CSS are involved because they improve smart city activities by providing tacit day-to-day knowledge. Distinguishing between socially and economically orientated CSS allows us to compare the involvement of legitimate stakeholders to user involvement and to unravel the factors influencing the involvement of CSS in smart city activities. For this, we build a framework that not only discerns between socially- and economically-orientated CSS but also distinguishes between three types of socio-technical factors that either limit or increase civil society involvement in smart city activities: (1) the activity’s type (2) the activity’s thematic domain, and (3) stakeholder constellations linked to the activity. Using chi-square-tests and logistic regressions we inquire into how the socio-technical factors defined in our framework influence the involvement of social and economic CSS in Amsterdam’s smart city activities. Our results show that the dominant thematic domains and the most common stakeholder constellations that characterize in Amsterdam’s smart city activities limit the involvement of social CSS. CSS involvement in smart city activities thus mainly entails the involvement of economically-orientated CSS.