Citizen participation in smart city: experience sharing

Method:

By referring to Arnstein's (1969) ladder of participation, Bovaird's (2007) co-production in the value chain of public services, and Kaika's (2017) critics on the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and smart city, we discuss on the relationship between citizen participation in smart city and the implementation of the NUA. The discussion goes along two means, viz. citizens as democratic participants, and citizens as co-producers; and at two levels, namely at city level, and at community project level.

How does it contributing?

Malaysian attendance of our event will gain insight on how “smartness” of the city can advance the NUA through stronger public-citizen-partnership. For none Malaysian attendance, it serves as an eye opener, perhaps a different perspective from viewing on the Malaysian smart cities or smart community projects in cultivating active and independent citizens.

How it will be relevant?

The current hit trend of smart city and plethora of examples are dominating the world’s urban development skyline. For example, 102 to 130 projects that are going were tracked by Pike Research and ABI Research, and IBM has modestly claims involvement in more than 2000 smarter cities project worldwide (Hollands, 2015). The above facts are of the corner stone and not to mention the high economic investment of multi-billions dollars of giant projects going on, such as Songdo’s $40 billion, and Pike Research forecast that the global smart city technology market will be worth over $20 billion US annually by 2020 (Navigant Research, n.d.). With the goals on achieving sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, this investment into “smart” techno-scientific monitoring and infrastructure technologies indicates the pursuit of urban sustainable development goals (SDGs) (Kaika 2017). However, does the investment in these ICT infrastructure able to fuel the implementation of NUA and the achievement of the SDGs? We argue that by doing so, it only solves part of the urban challenges and we strongly propose to invest more in human and culture viz. citizen participation, which is indeed the “smartness” that a city should focus on.