Guiding visions of corporate smart city innovators: Identifying opportunities for participatory futuring

Abstract

Since the smart city vision increasingly shapes our urban life globally, it becomes ever more urgent to integrate participatory futuring in ongoing smart city-related technology development. This study aimed to find starting points for such integration by unraveling the ‘guiding visions’ of corporate technological innovators in the smart mobility and transport sector around Amsterdam. We conducted and analyzed interviews with innovators from 12 smart city start-ups and scale-ups based on three elements of guiding visions: (1) the desired future city, (2) the purposes of technologies they expect to fulfill, and (3) how technologies are thought to relate to their wider societal context. The interviewed innovators appeared to envision a clean, frictionless future city, whereby smart city technologies fulfilled four purposes: catalyzing efficiency, nudging citizens, customizing user experiences, and connecting places and people. Innovators’ ambitions for societal participation were modest and mainly aimed at end-users to optimize design features. Overall, the innovators’ guiding visions highlight the need for participatory futuring approaches that appeal to innovators’ motivation to make a social contribution, but also help them to widen and deepen their understanding of the public values that citizens perceive to be at stake in the smart city.