Involving citizens in smart city projects: Systems engineering meets participation

Abstract

Nowadays, the term smart city is often used as a selling argument for projects. Unfortunately, it is often degraded to a simple use of advanced technology. However, it was demonstrated in several scientific publications as well as for example in Amsterdam city that the citizen's quality of life shall be one of the main objectives in any smart city project. In order to enhance this topic, we provide a clear view on the implementation of smart city projects from the citizen's perspective. In this paper, we first describe the importance of citizen's participation and different forms of such participation in different smart city project phases. Two case studies are presented as well to demonstrate the benefits of participation in municipal projects. Additionally, we propose a formal solution to this topic. In general, Systems Engineering methodologies are used in order to ensure the right project outcome. There are different methodologies, mostly adopted from the information technology field. Unfortunately, they focus mainly on the relation between a customer (in the case of smart cities it is typically a municipality) and a solution provider. They also do not take into account the new challenges which occur in smart city projects, such as focus on interdisciplinary teams, sharing of resources, or even involvement of citizens. In this paper we enhance this topic by demonstrating how a Hybrid-Agile Methodology (HAM) can used to involve citizens in the different project phases. This is certainly a novel approach not addressed by the current methodologies and not properly addressed in smart city projects. It has been mentioned several times that we cannot have a smart city without smart citizens.