Exploring the Smart City Adoption Process: Evidence from the Belgian urban context

TL;DR

This paper discusses the socio-technical process of adopting Smart City initiatives in Belgium, emphasizing participative approaches involving users and municipal actors to enhance sustainable development and address socio-economic challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a socio-technical perspective on Smart City adoption, highlighting participative strategies as key success factors and discussing their limitations.

Findings

Participative approaches facilitate Smart City adoption.

User involvement improves system sustainability.

Limitations of participative methods are identified.

Abstract

In this position paper, we explore the adoption of a Smart City with a socio-technical perspective. A Smart city is a transformational technological process leading to profound modifications of existing urban regimes and infrastructure components. In this study, we consider a Smart City as a socio-technical system where the interplay between technologies and users ensures the sustainable development of smart city initiatives that improve the quality of life and solve important socio-economic problems. The adoption of a Smart City required a participative approach where users are involved during the adoption process to joint optimise both systems. Thus, we contribute to socio-technical research showing how a participative approach based on press relationships to facilitate information exchange between municipal actors and citizens worked as a success factor for the smart city adoption. We also discuss the limitations of this approach.