The importance of citizen engagement in realizing smart city benefits

There is an increasing trend for deploying and using smart technologies and services to resolve critical challenges (e.g. climate change, pollution, the ageing population, and energy shortage) faced by modern cities, and creating so-called "smart cities". Nevertheless, although smart cities are driven by advanced information technologies, their success is highly dependent on user/citizen engagement. The study reported in this paper seeks to provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that lack of citizen engagement can significantly affect the realization of the benefits promised by smart cities. The research team selected and used London's smart parking service as a case study, in which a questionnaire was distributed to local car owners and a total of 212 responses was collected. The results showed that London's smart parking service can potentially help: 1) individual drivers to save an average of £68 on petrol annually and reduce CO2 emissions by 238.14 kg per car per year; and 2) the whole city to save £183.6 million worth of petrol per year and reduce its annual CO2 emissions by 642,978 tons. However, public engagement (in terms of citizen awareness and usage) in this smart service was found to be extremely low, and so presented substantial barriers to realize these potential economic and environmental benefits.