Hearing the Voice of Citizens in Smart City Design: The CitiVoiceFramewor

Abstract

In the last few years, smart cities have attractedconsiderable attention because they are considered aresponse to the complex challenges that modern cities face.However, smart cities often do not optimally reach theirobjectives if the citizens, the end-users, are not involved intheir design. The aim of this paper is to provide a frame-work to structure and evaluate citizen participation in smartcities. By means of a literature review from differentresearch areas, the relevant enablers of citizen participationare summarized and bundled in the proposed CitiVoiceframework. Then, following the design science methodol-ogy, the content and the utility of CitiVoice are validatedthrough the application to different smart cities and throughin-depth interviews with key Belgian smart city stake-holders. CitiVoice is used as an evaluation tool for severalBelgian smart cities allowing drawbacks and flaws in cit-izens’ participation to be discovered and analyzed. It is alsodemonstrated how CitiVoice can act as a governance toolfor the ongoing smart city design of Namur (Belgium) tohelp define the citizen participation strategy. Finally, it isused as a comparison and creativity tool to compare severalcities and design new means of participation