THE BEHAVIOURS AND JOB POSITIONS OF CITIZENS IN SMART CITIES’ DEVELOPMENT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21837/pm.v17i10.635Keywords:
role of citizen, public participation, smart city, public engagementAbstract
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.
Downloads
References
Albino, V., Berardi, U., & Dangelico, R. (2015). Smart cities: Definitions, dimensions, performance, and initiatives. Journal of Urban Technology, 22(1), 3-21.
Alonso, R. G., & Castro, S. L. (2016). Technology helps, people make: A smart city governance framework grounded in deliberative democracy. In J. Gil-Garcia (Ed.), Smarter as the New Urban Agenda (pp. 333-347). Cham Heidelberg: Springer.
Araya, D. (Ed.). (2015). Smart cities as democratic ecologies. New York & London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baldersheim, H. (2013, September). Smart cities = smart citizens? Are smart cities and smart citizen different? Analysis of survey data from Norway. In The ECPR General Conference. September 4-7, 2013, Bordeaux, France.
Bason, C. (2013). Engaging citizens in policy innovation: Benefiting public policy from the design inputs of citizens and stakeholders as ‘experts.’ In Lindquist et al. (Ed.), Putting citizens first. engagement in policy and service delivery for the 21st century. Canberra: ANU Press.
Berntzen, L., & Johannessen, M. R. (2016a). The role of citizen participation in municipal smart city projects: Lessons learned from Norway. In J. Gil-Garcia (Ed.), Smarter as the New Urban Agenda (pp. 299-314). Cham Heidelberg: Springer.
Berntzen, L., & Johannessen, M. R. (2016b). The role of citizens in “smart cities.” In Management International Conference. University of Presov, Slovakia.
Bovaird, T. (2007). Beyond engagement and participation: User and community coproduction of public services. Public Admininistration Review, 67(5), 846-860
Boyte, H. C. (2018). How Americans can reweave our fraying social fabric. Retrieved November 6, 2018, from https://www.minnpost.com/communityvoices/2018/11/how-americans-can-reweave-our-fraying-social-fabric/
Callahan, K. (2007). Citizen participation: Models and methods. International Journal of Public Administration, 30(11), 1179-1196.
Cardullo, P., & Kitchin, R. (2017). Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation. County Kildare, Ireland.
Castelnovo, W. (2016). Co-production makes cities smarter: Citizens’ participation in smart city initiatives. In M. Fugini (Ed.), Co-production in the public sector (pp. 97-117). AG Switzerland: Springer.
Chourabi, H., Nam, T., Walker, S., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Mellouli, S., Nahon, K., …& Scholl, H. J. (2012). Understanding smart cities: An integrative framework. In
Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii ICSS (pp. 2289-2297).
Fong, V. (2017). Smart Selangor Blueprint: Selangor smart cities? Retrieved February 1, 2018, from http://www.smartcitiesasia.com/blueprint-smart-city-selangor/
Giffinger, R., Fertner, C., Kramar, H., Kalasek, R., Pichler, N., & Meijers, E. (2007). Smart cities: Ranking of European medium-sized cities. Wien: TU Vienna.
Gonzalez, A. L. (2017). Where to volunteer, donate to help victims of hurricane Harvey. Retrieved February 7, 2018, from https://www.sacurrent.com/thedaily/archives/2017/08/28/where-to-volunteer-donate-to-help- victims-ofhurricane-harvey
Harrington, K. (2017). Smart city leaders, champions, and entrepreneurs. In V. Kumar (Ed.), Smart economy in smart cities (pp. 1005-1012). Singapore: Springer.
Koolhaas, R. (2014). My thoughts on the smart city. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/mythoughts-smart-city- rem-koolhaas.html
Laher, S., & Botha, A. (2012). Methods of sampling. In C. Wagner, B. Kawulich, & M. Garner (Eds.), Doing social research: A global context. Berkshire: McGrawHill.
Lara, A. P., Moreira Da Costa, E., Furlani, T. Z., & Yigitcanlar, T. (2016). Smartness that matters: towards a comprehensive and human-centred characterisation of smart cities. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market & Complexity, 2(1), 1-13.
Lee, T., Hong, S.-G., & Jeong, H. (2016). A study on smart city development project for regional innovation: Co-creation and design thinking approach. Advanced Science and Technology Letters, 141, pp.48-52.
Linders, D. (2012). From e-government to we-government: Defining a typology for citizen coproduction in the age of social media. Government Information Quarterly, 29, 446-454.
Menteri Besar Inc. [MBI] (2017). 6-in-1 digital urban & future commerce events. Retrieved February 1, 2018, from http://www.selangorsmartcity.com/
Malaysian Communications & Multimedia Commission [MCMC]. (2016). Digital connectivity: Industry performance report 2015. Cyberjaya: Author.
Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation (4th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Mora, L., Bolici, R., & Deakin, M. (2017). The first two decades of smart-city research:Abibliometric analysis. Journal of Urban Technology, 24(1), 3-27.
Mora, L., Deakin, M., Reid, A., & Angelidou, M. (2019). How to overcome the
dichotomous nature of smart city research: Proposed methodology and results of a pilot study. Journal of Urban Technology, 26(2), 89-128.
Morison, J. (2007). Models of democracy: From representation to participation? In J. Jowell & D. Oliver (Eds.), The changing constitution (pp. 134-156). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nam, T., & Pardo, T. (2011). Conceptualizing smart city with dimensions of technology, people & institutions. In Proceedings of the 12th ICDGR (pp. 282-291).
SSDU (2016). Smart Selangor executive summary 2016. Menteri Besar Selangor Inc.
Thomas, J. C. (2013). Citizen, customer, partner: Rethinking the place of the public in public management. Public Administration Review, 73(6), 786-796.
Thomas, V., Wang, D., Mullagh, L., & Dunn, N. (2016). Where’s wally? In search of citizen perspectives on the smart city. Sustainability, 8(207), 1-13.
UCLG (2016). Executive summary of co-creating the urban future: The agenda of metropolises, cities and territories (Vol. Gold IV). Barcelona: United Cities and Local Governments.
Vanolo, A. (2016). Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities. Futures, 82, 26-36.
Vigoda, E. (2002). From responsiveness to collaboration: Governance, citizens, and the next generation of public administration. Public Administration Review, 62(5), 527-540.
Willems, J., Bergh, J. Van den, & Viaene, S. (2017). Smart city projects and citizen participation: The case of London. In R. Andeßner (Ed.), Public sector
management in a globalized world (pp. 249-266). Fachmedien Wiesbaden:
Springer.
Williams, S. I. (2014). Engaging citizens in democratic governance and the decisionmaking process with congressional committees. Minneapolis: Walden University.
Winters, J. V. (2011). Why are smart cities growing? Who moves and who stays. Journal of Regional Science, 51(2), 253-270
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright & Creative Commons Licence
eISSN: 0128-0945 © Year. The Authors. Published for Malaysia Institute of Planners. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.
The authors hold the copyright without restrictions and also retain publishing rights without restrictions.
