Smart cities : overview of citizen participation across application domains

Smart Cities is a widely discussed topic in the social sciences. At first, awareness of Smart Cities in society was based mainly on the fact that these are cities that use modern information and communication technology (ICT) to ensure the provision of public services to their citizens. However, with the development of technology and the growing openness, the role of citizens in the city administration is changing. Thanks to the day-to-day use of ICT to communicate with the city administration, citizens are gradually becoming from ordinary consumers of public services to their co-designers and co-authors. The existing body of literature has so far focused mainly on describing examples of forms of involving citizens in the design and creation of specific public services in selected application domains. However, a comprehensive overview and comparison of citizen participation between different application domains is lacking in the literature. Therefore, the aim of this article is to provide an overview of the development of citizen participation in the concept of Smart Cities and its various application domains. Our research has shown that the topic of Smart Cities is a widely discussed topic in society, especially over the last 10 years. At the same time, our findings confirmed that there exist differences between application domains in citizen participation. From an analysis of published scientific articles on Smart Cities, we found that most of the articles on Smart Cities deal with the fields of natural resources and energy, transportation and mobility, and living. However, from the perspective of the participation of citizens, there are other application domains at the top of the number of publications.