Smart City Stakeholder Engagement: Making Living Labs Work

This paper discusses experience to date on seeking to involve stakeholders in the co-design of e-services in a Smart City Living lab. We discuss the experience of five cities in Europe using the Peripheria project’s approach to open innovation and citizens’ engagement in the development and deployment of smart city services. Recent practice and emergent trends in five City Arenas are analyzed, drawing on the results of detailed case study research. These are set against the ‘good practice’ expectations about how co-design should occur as set out by the European Network of Living Labs. Based on the case studies, a set of propositions are explored about what needs to be done to build smart citizens’ communities required to shape the future smart city. The paper suggests that if smart cities are to deliver a better quality of life in more attractive urban areas, new ways of engaging with the stakeholders are necessary to provide for not just a better access and inclusion of citizens but also to empowering them to act as a catalyst in transforming the dynamics of city services. In light of the demands of delivering the future Internet, cities also need to re-define what they mean by claiming to be a ‘smart city’ and to reconfigure what they take to be the underlying role and assumptions that shape stakeholder engagement in the Living lab.