The people's smart city dashboard (PSCD): Delivering on community-led governance with blockchain

Abstract

Smart City dashboards, also known as Mayor's dashboards, are to visualise city's performance on strategic policy areas such as sustainable mobility, energy efficiency, air pollution, etc. Therefore, they use indicators and indices as quantitative means to display performance. This research studies the current delivery of strategic smart city agendas as well as current means to measure and present their performance and proposes a method that uses blockchain to reimagine both in a more empowering and collaborative manner, the so-called People's Smart City Dashboard (PSCD). The thesis of this research is that smart city agendas have failed in their promise of being citizen-centric instruments and this is due to their top-down approach. This can be reversed by using community-led technologies such as blockchain. However, this bottom-up and blockchain-based implementation of smart city agendas will require from new, people-centric measurement tools and thus the so-called Activators and Aggregators are designed as well.