What do people want in a smart city? Exploring the stakeholders’ opinions, priorities and perceived barriers in a medium-sized city in the United States

ABSTRACT

Many cities in the United States are pursuing agendas to implement ICT-based solutions to tackle urban challenges, thus achieving the ‘smart city’ label. While the discussion on this urban development paradigm has revolved around the intensive use of technologies, the academic literature increasingly calls for shifting the focus to the people living in the cities. This paper argues that to achieve a people-centred smart city, cities should include the perspectives of all the local stakeholders. Under this assumption, this paper provides the views of the local stakeholders in a medium-sized city in Tennessee, Chattanooga. Particularly, this study explores their perceived smart city concept, the ethical standards that should guide smart city projects, the desired future projects in their community, and the barriers to implementing them. The data was collected using a combination of participatory budgeting, five focus groups, and twenty-eight interviews with city dwellers, entrepreneurs, university faculty, non-profit members, and government officials. The results suggest that, far from the image of a highly technological city, the stakeholders envision a city dedicated to improving the quality of life and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, to achieve this smart city, the projects need to be based on full transparency and the promotion of social inclusion. In contrast to the dominant trend towards the privatization of urban space, this study finds that the stakeholders prefer public based smart city projects such as ICT-based public transport services. However, its successful implementation will have to overcome the barriers caused by funding constraints, public acceptance, and political interests. Cities may use the results of this study to design more responsible smart city projects that strike an optimal point between citizen engagement and technological applications and innovations while supporting all stakeholders’ needs.

Highlights

• Stakeholders’ opinions on smart city projects in Chattanooga were examined

• Chattanooga can be considered an example of a medium-sized smart city

• Public-based, transparent and socially inclusive projects are preferred

• Preferences on smart city projects varied across groups of stakeholders

• Including all city stakeholders’ visions can reduce social cleavages

KEYWORDS:

• Urban design
• urban governance
• smart urbanism
• participation
• qualitative study
• ethical standards

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Kim Sapp for her administrative assistance and Katie Meadows for her research assistance. To the reviewers and Soeun Park, Editorial Assistant, for their comments, which helped us improve the overall quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The EPB is the publicly owned electric power distribution and telecommunications company operating in Chattanooga.

2 The Company Lab (Co.Lab) is a nonprofit startup accelerator that supports entrepreneurial growth in Chattanooga.

3 Along with another U.S. city, San José, the initiative includes other 34 cities from 22 countries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Cádiz under collaboration agreement UCA/R08REC/2018.