Perspectives on citizen participation for the digital age: urban development based research and case study

Abstract

Since we are experimenting now a new era of cities being deployed with smart technologies, citizen participation is a complementary task to these cities. Traditional ways being used for civic engagement are not interesting anymore to most of the citizens, as attracting a diverse group of citizens to participate can be challenging, since citizen involvement is often a leisure-time activity and competes with other ways of spending time (Oksman et al., 2014). This research investigates the possible ways of attracting people to the Co-creation process as well as utilizing the latest innovative technologies that could be applied as a participation tool. This study used the concluded results from the previous practical work as a reference to create a strong theoretical background discussing several aspects of the subject. A conceptual proposal was designed afterwards, including several steps that should be implemented in sequence, followed by the implementation phase which includes a business model strategy and finally a discussion and evaluation of the expected outcomes