Empowering Citizens in a Smart City Project One Step at a Time: a Norwegian Case Study

Abstract

Considering public participation as one of the key components of “smart cities”, efforts have been made by local governments to provide opportunities for citizens to take an active role in smart cities planning. This paper presents preliminary results of a collaboration between academics and municipal staff to identify the best practices in terms of public participation in smart and sustainable development projects. From the legal framework enforcing minimum requirements for public participation as information and consultation to the implementation one of the first online participatory budget initiative in Norway; this study analyzes the context in which public participation initiatives work in practice to achieve the highest degree of participation, namely citizen empowerment. Documents provided by the municipality as well as other publicly available ones were analyzed in order to identify the different degrees of public participation at each step of the project. Results from this study indicate that pushing the threshold a little bit higher at each step can help concretizing citizen empowerment at the neighborhood level. Keywords — smart city, public participation, citizen empowerment, collaborative evaluation