Smart City Solutions for Net-Zero Cities: Citizen Participation in EU-Funded Smart Cities and Communities Projects

In recent decades, the focus on ICTs as enablers for tackling urban issues has given rise to the concept of a “smart city”. Aside from technology, one of the key aspects of smart city urban development and governance approach is citizen participation, encompassed by participatory governance. Scholars such as Hollands criticise the extensive technological and business-driven focus and neoliberal bias of a smart city, and advocate for greater consideration of citizen needs. Citizen engagement initiatives, however, can be seen as technocratic and instrumental, and even if they are framed as “citizen-centric", the true role of citizens remains contested. The EU leads smart city development, with many initiatives aiming to improve citizens' lives. Thus this dissertation first explores how the EU fosters the development of smart cities through funding programmes and initiatives. The study then delves into the case of Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) projects to uncover how citizens are involved and their roles in developing smart city solutions. In this qualitative study, the framework drawing from Arnstein’s ladder by Tomor and the framework of CitiVoice are applied to discover the participation forms and citizen roles. Finally, the study concludes with the lessons learned from the large-scale EU-funded projects and how the programmes can be improved to increase the level of citizen participation and grant citizens more impactful roles. The findings show that citizens were involved in various forms, highlighting that citizen participation is a spectrum and not merely either citizen subjugation or citizen power. While passive participation and consumerism participation forms were certainly prominent, there were also many initiatives with citizens as co-creators and those granting citizens powerful roles. Nonetheless, there is a clear need to expand democratic participation by re-politicising smart city development, and to ensure support for bottom-up initiatives and the citizen use of open data.