Citizen engagement in Cape Town's transition towards a smart city

Abstract

Cape Town is facing increased urbanisation, urban growth and other complex challenges which hinder its objectives regarding socio-economic development and quality of life for all its' citizens and visitors. To help meet these challenges, Cape Town is implementing “smart city” innovations. The smart city concept has typically been associated with an urban area where technology is embedded everywhere to enable traffic, water, energy, sewage, commerce etc. to be greatly improved, but sometimes the technology leads us to disregard the fact that the main aim of a smart city must be about the citizens and it is important to not only focus on technology but also to engage with society. Best practice smart cities understand the importance of engaging, encouraging, enabling and empowering citizen initiatives to achieve transformative social, economic and environmental benefits. Cities that are built from scratch have the luxury of including a vision for intelligence and integration of technology from their inception and construction and applies a top down process without citizen engagement. However, established cities with complex urban problems and conflicting forces are far more demanding and to overcome persistent problems including sustainability, attractiveness and competitiveness is not as simple as painting on an empty canvas. With the objective of determining how aligned Cape Town's Smart City initiatives are to those of its' citizens and visitors a research instrument was constructed to contrast implemented initiatives against possible initiatives, and based on the results there was a majority positive response to all initiatives excluding education initiatives.