Citizen participation in the design of smart cities: methods and management framework

In the last fewyears, smart cities have attracted considerable attention because they are considered a response to the complex chal-lenges that modern cities face.Smartcities can provide innovative solutions in various domains such as environment, economy, mobili-ty, safety with technology as enabler. However, this is only possible if the citizens, the end-users,are involved in the designof the smart city.The aim of this chapteris toprovide a repository of methods and useful guidelinesto manage citizen participation inthe design of smart cities.By means of a literature review from different research areasand ananalysis of concrete and well-established smart cities, the rele-vant methods of citizen participation are identified and described. These methods are bundled into three categories: citizens as demo-cratic participants, citizens as co-creators,and citizens as ICT users. Furthermore, we present the CitiVoiceFramework, a management tool for decision-makers to manage citizen participation that we apply in the context of three Belgian Smart Cities (Mons, Namur, Brussels).This framework builds upon the identified participation methods and has three different uses: 1)as anevaluation tool allowing drawbacksand flaws in citizens’ participation to be discovered and analysed; 2)as a governance tool to help define the citizen participation strategy; and 3) as a comparison and creativity tool to compare several cities and design new means of participation