Analyzing citizen participation and engagement in european smart cities

Abstract

With the advent of smart cities, governance has been placed at the core of the debate on how to create public value and achieve a high quality of life in urban environments. In particular, given that public value is rooted in democratic theory and new technologies that promote networking spaces have emerged, citizen participation represents one of the principal instruments to make government open and close to the citizenry needs. Participation in urban governance has undergone a great development: from the first postmodernist ideals of countering expert dominance to today’s focus on learning and social innovation, where citizen participation is conceptualized as co-creation and co-production. Despite this development, there is a lack of research to know how this new governance context is taking place in the smart city arena. Addressing this situation, in this paper we present an exhaustive survey of the research literature and a deep overview of the experience in participative initiatives followed by smart cities in Europe. Through an analysis of 149 smart city initiatives from 76 European cities, we provide interesting insights about how participatory models have been introduced in the different areas or dimensions of the cities, how citizen engagement is promoted in smart city initiatives, and whether the so-called creative smart cities are those with a higher number of projects governed in a participatory way.