Social Innovation and Local Initiatives as Part of Smart Society: Case Study of Urban Kampongs in Semarang and Batam Smart Cities

Abstract

Many cities in Indonesia have adopted the smart city concept. Centered around the utilization of digital technology, the concept is expected to address a multitude of urban problems and entail different aspects of urban systems. One important aspect of a smart city is smart people/society. In this paper, our aim is to highlight social innovation, and local initiatives, which we argue as two notable characteristics of smart society, in urban kampongs in two Indonesian cities, Semarang and Batam. We believe that a city cannot be smart by just relying on the physical infrastructure and technological artifacts without the support of its communities. Social innovation and local initiatives were thus investigated to uncover the bottom-up process in Indonesia's smart city co-creation. Additionally, we highlight a particular urban place that tends to be overlooked in the smart city discussion, i.e., urban kampong, to bring up urban diversity. The novelty of this paper is to analyze the concept of smart people, which must be attached to the concept of a smart city. Because there are still few articles that discuss the importance of smart people. In this paper, smart people will be seen from social innovations and local initiatives from residents in urban kampongs. In this research, we mainly used primary data collected through focused group discussions and in-depth interviews.