Smartening-Up Communities in Less-Privileged Urban Areas—The DemoCU Participatory Cultural Planning Experience in Korydallos—Greece Municipality

Abstract

Coping with contemporary urban challenges and smart city developments actually implies a conscious effort to engage a range of actors of local ecosystems and transform ways of implementing things in a significant, fundamental and structural rather than incremental manner, which results in more qualitative outcomes and cooperative, highly inclusive, decision-making processes that affect current and future quality of local communities’ living perspectives. Citizens and stakeholders’ participation in such an effort is growing in importance, in alignment with the currently prevailing shift from a top-down to a bottom-up planning paradigm. Along these lines, the focus of this paper is on smartening up local communities, considered as the heart of smart cities’ development. More specifically, the paper targets citizens and stakeholders’ empowerment and engagement in a specific cultural planning exercise in a less privileged suburb of Athens metropolitan area, the Municipality of Korydallos. This is accomplished by the development of an innovative stepwise participatory planning framework, effectively combining classical and Web-based participatory tools for establishing face-to-face and online interaction at the different steps of the participatory process; and broadening substantial participation of various citizens and stakeholders’ groups in this exercise.