The Role of Living Labs in Developing Smart Cities in Indonesia

Abstract

This chapter studies the role of living labs in smart city development in four Indonesian cities: Depok, Semarang, Bekasi and South Tangerang. Since 2012, Indonesian cities have started to incorporate the smart city approach for solving urban problems. One of the main similarities between these cities in implementing the smart city approach is the adoption of information and communication technol- ogy to improve public services by making citizens’ applications easier and better traceable. This research showed that despite political and technical support from the national government to develop smart cities, its implementation was obstructed by silos between different institutions and the persistence of non-digital documents, which make them difficult to analyze and share. Through action research in these cities, it was shown that the smart city is best approached as a ‘living lab’, i.e. a continuous-collaboration space between various stakeholders to sense city condi- tions (needs, problems, future limits) based on real-time data and to react to these conditions accordingly. The analysis showed that one of the success factors for such living labs is to find a balance between social forms of support, for example politi- cal, financial or cultural, and technical forms of support, for example infrastructure and technology.