Smart cities must pay more attention to the people who live in them
In consequence, strategies and projects focus too much on technology and not enough on cities’ inhabitants. This issue has been raised before in academia and has been answered with frameworks and standards such as the Boston Smart City Playbook or the BSI Smart City Standards.
Yet research has shown that there are still shortcomings and contradictions regarding true inhabitant-centricity. In light of the fact that inhabitant-centricity and citizen engagement are deciding success factors for any smart city transformation, it becomes vital to put inhabitants first.
Otherwise cities might invest significantly into services that its people will neither use nor want. If decision-makers do not change the current trajectory, we will see more protests similar to the ones in Toronto this year.
Owing to the popularity of smart cities, political decision-makers can use smart city projects for branding while stimulating investments. Unfortunately, there is a huge technology-knowledge gap in politics, inhibiting the development of reasonable strategies. The lack of knowledge is compensated for by seeking assistance from third parties that might have their own agenda.
The IESE Cities in Motion Index (CIMI) 2018 presented a well-designed ranking of cities, and stated that collaboration (between, for example, residents and administration, public-private-partnerships and between cities) is critical for success, yet did not take into account any parameters for inhabitant-centricity and citizen-engagement when determining their ranking.
Easy Park’s Smart City Index 2017 used election turnout as proxy for citizen participation, which does not necessarily translate in a more democratic and inhabitant-centric smart city. A more recent ranking by the Eden Strategy Institute included people-centricity as one of 10 equally weighted parameters, defining it as a people-first approach without answering how it could be quantitatively measured.
The logical consequence of a people-first approach would have been to mirror the importance in the overall weighing for the total score, which did not happen. Some rankings did use political participation as proxy for citizen engagement in smart city projects. However, depending on the political system, many city officials that are involved in smart city projects are not democratically elected but simply public officials, which limits the significance of the used parameter. And since those rankings are often quoted in the media and used by cities for marketing purposes, this has a self-reinforcing effect.
Smart city rankings should start to research and use indicators such as the existence of a digital co-collaboration platform, means of offline engagement (a dedicated office, door-to-door and phone surveys, for example), percentage of surveyed city population, community representatives in steering committees, incorporation of continuous citizen-feedback, number of public events, free digital literacy education, the possibility to opt-out of data-collection, ratio of bottom-up versus top-down initiated projects, transparent communication and transparency regarding contracting to commercial-partners (such as data usage or monetisation).
