Smart City - Challenges and Opportuniti...

Cities are increasingly challenged by rapid urbanization, increasing environmental issues and growing citizen demand. Technical innovations like smart city concepts provide possible solutions to arising problems like traffic congestion, inefficient and ineffective infrastructure and environmental pollution. Smart cities aim to ensure an efficient, sustainable, equitable and livable, environmental-friendly living space. This leads to rapidly changing settings for the management and governance of cities and hence represents major challenges from the perspective of public management.

The project takes a public management perspective and offers insights into a topic that has been mainly investigated applying a technological view so far. Smart city concepts are expected to offer potential benefits for both, citizens and government. The main objective of the project therefore is to investigate smart city concepts as innovation by focusing on the implications for the administration of cities (local government management) and for their citizens. The project will address the following research questions and aspects:

• Benefits for citizens, the local government, and upper governmental levels (other public organzations) through the implementation of smart city concepts
• The bases of local governments’ decisions for or against implementation of smart city concepts (cost-benefit-analyses, impact assessment etc.)
• Factors driving and inhibiting acceptance of smart city concepts by citizens, and the role of different stakeholders and actor groups (citizen initiatives, lobbying groups, opinion leaders) for citizen participation

The project is divided into three research phases where different qualitative (interviews, observation) and quantitative methods (online-survey, statistical analyses) are applied in order to explore the distinct aspects of the research.