THE BEHAVIOURS AND JOB POSITIONS OF CITIZENS IN SMART CITIES’ DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Of the three major actors in smart cities, citizens have the most ambiguous roles, unlike the government which is the clear decision-maker, and the private technological players which are obviously supposed to provide state-of-the-art technologies to smart cities. Evidently, the possession of ambiguous characteristics or vague roles can result in the manipulation and subjugation of the general public by the power-holders. Thus, the objective of this paper is toidentify the desirable characteristics – including the behaviours and job positions – of the citizens who participate in the development of smart cities. Following the conduction of semi-structured interviews on the stakeholders of smart cities, it was found that citizens can actually be (1) active and independent volunteers in public life, (2) local champions or co-producers of public values, as well as (3) aware and educated-intention human sensors who drive changes, instead of being passive users of data or beneficiaries of services. It has been argued that the creation of smart cities is reliant on a deeper understanding of the citizens’ characteristics, apart from the implementation of policies which generate aware and civic-minded citizens.