Citizen Participation in Smart Cities: Evaluation Framework Proposal

Abstract

During the last years, smart cities have attracted considerable attention because they are considered a response to the complex challenges that modern cities face. Smart cities provide new solutions in the domains of mobility, environment, economy, governance, quality of life, and education thanks to the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). However, smart cities often do not optimally reach their objectives if the citizens, the end-users, are not involved in their design. This article investigates how the citizens can transform a city into a smart city by being involved in the democratic process, by cocreating the smart city projects, and by proactively using the city's ICT infrastructure.This article contributes to the smart city domain in several ways. Firstly, a literature review from different research fields is performed in order to identify the different means to enable citizen participation in a smart city. Secondly, a framework to compare and evaluate smart cities as enablers of citizen participation is proposed, based on the findings of the preceding section. Finally, the framework is applied to the ongoing smart city design of Namur (Belgium), allowing drawbacks and flaws in citizens' participation to be discovered and improved.