How Do Citizens Want to Participate in Smart City Programs? Some Answers from Greece

Abstract

For democratically elected local authorities that are pursuing smart city goals, public engagement is a logical priority. To that aim, the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is typically recognized as holding great promises toward improving cooperation between citizens and public administrations. However, ICT also brings important challenges. Particularly important is the identification of the right incentives and technologies and the development of the best methods. In this book chapter, we present and discuss preliminary results from a public survey which attempted to clarify these aspects in the context of Greece. A questionnaire was developed and distributed by email and social media. In line with the usual expectations in Western high-income countries, the results show that the majority of respondents wish to participate by using ICT, especially through applications available on smart mobile devices, especially motivated by personal interest and education levels. There is a clear and overwhelming desire of the citizens to be involved as partners, based on an intelligent and practical combination of democratic principles and technologies. At the same time, the results highlighted a list of technical aspects that may need special attention during academic research and public policy-making. While the described study reflects a Western and democratic, bottom-up type of policy-making input (acting in complementarity with more top-down institutional frameworks), it also reflects a universal set of human rights. Thus, the fact that this study comes from the cradle of civilization that is Greece (with its city states of ancient times and its uninterrupted civilizational continuum up to present times) holds a particularly strong and interesting significance for the future of humanity. In the context of current knowledge, according to which the global transition to sustainable development incorporates also smart city thinking (and vice versa), national policy-makers cannot just “inform” the citizens but must involve them right from the beginning; otherwise the proposed solutions will fail to be accepted or/and will be too weak, and more problems will arise. Since this is as important for the Greeks as it is for the whole world, our study underscores the fact that researchers have a duty to study societal issues while public administrators have a duty to organize intelligent, transparent, and efficient dialogue with both experts and citizens.