Oliver rafaj (p)

Zsofia Viktória Vida

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.

Zsofia Viktória Vida (p), Balázs Borsi, Sándor Soós

Oliver Rafaj

'see extended absract'
The widespread, networked and ubiquitous use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in city management paved the way for research about the ‘smart city’, however, scientific discussion about smart cities is fairly new and interdisciplinary. While there is a strong technological orientation of the research on smart cities, clearly there are social and socio-economic as well as sustainability-oriented components. The vast majority of the population and the researchers-professionals, who need to be involved in smart city development, live in urban areas. As such, concentration and the scientific networks of the broadly interpreted ‘smart city professionals’ is an interesting field of research enquiry. The overarching research objective is increasing our understanding about the smarty city concepts, the knowledge domains comprising it and the scientific networks of the knowledge domains involved. Has the smart city field been integrating and framing its own disciplinary boundaries? Which cities and urban regions are home to smart city professionals? How has the scientific collaboration between smart city professionals evolved? How can the quality of the connections, the communication and the social and cognitive relationships between them be described? How can scientific collaborations be described in geographical space and across cities? Using the Web of Science database, metadata for ‘smart city’ research articles are used. Three distinct lines of research (based on author-defined keywords, bibliographic coupling, scientific network analysis via cities) is implemented. The highest number of smart city articles are published in computer science journals and the lion’s share of smart city articles is published in technology and engineering outlets. Nevertheless, the fastest growing disciplinary areas, which publish smart city articles also include business and economics, public administration and geography as well as environmental sciences. The next steps of research include city-level network analysis of the affiliation of the researcher-authors and potentially the comparison with available smart city rankings or lists.