Developing and validating a citizen-centric typology for smart city services

Abstract

This study proposes a new typological framework for classifying smart city services. Intentionally focused on citizen-centricity, away from bureaucratic perspectives that most typologies have taken, this typology is derived from marketing and service science literature. The proposed typology consists of four dimensions: mode of technology (automate–informative–transformative), purpose of service (hedonic–utilitarian), service authority (voluntary–mandatory), and delivery mode (passive–interactive). This typological framework is validated with a qualitative exercise of classifying inventories of actual smart city services in practice into the framework. Exercise results revealed that the categories provided are mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive in general, and useful in further conceptualization of new services by identifying gaps in reality. In practice, this typology would be useful in positioning specific smart city service under development in terms of citizen-centricity. Urban planners and administrators may use this framework in understanding the pattern of their service development. Also, this framework may provide a useful guideline for service designer pinpointing the design characteristics of old and new smart city services from the perspective of users and customers of city services: citizens.