Citizens’ participation, coproduction and the city smartness: an exploratory study

Walter Castelnovo

Dipartimento di Scienze Teoriche e Applicate – Università dell’Insubria

Aims

▪ Exploring the use of concepts related to co-production within the smart city academic literature

Motivations

▪ Citizens’ participation is a core concept in smartcity initiaitves

▪ Co-production can be considered as an enhancedform of participation

Background: citizen-centricity

supply-driven and government/vendor push approach:

• citizens are considered as the potential users of the services delivered by the city.

• Their active contribution to smart city initiatives amounts to the decision on whether to adopt and use those services.

demand-driven and bottom-up approach:

• the focus is on people and their needs, priorities and expectations

• citizens are expected to actively contributing to the design and implementation of the services

FOR the users FROM the users BY the users

Background: co-production

In the private sector

end-users taking over specific activities in the production chain. Under this view, coproduction takes place during the offering creation stage and concerns activities preceding the consumption of the offering

co-production

end-user involvement as value cocreators whose experiences with products and services at the consumption stage can be of added value for a company

co-creation

Background: co-production

In the public sector

Bovaird (2007):

“the provision of services through regular, long-term relationships between professionalized service providers (in any sector) and service users or other members of the community, where all parties make substantial resource contributions”

Osborne et al. (2016)

“The user’s contribution as a co-producer during service production in not only unavoidable (…) but is also crucial to the performance of a service. Such co-production leads to the co-creation of value for the service user”

Exploration of the smart city literature

full-text search performed on Google Scholar on July 2016, using some combinations of keywords:

1

2

Exploration of the smart city literature

Results

Results

Results

Results

More data

Indexed papers

(37)

Non indexed

papers (168)

keywords abstract keywords abstract

Co-production 1 1 2 14

Co-creation 4 8 6 24

Co-design 2 3 7 25

Discussion

Papers indexed in the Social Science area

▪ The papers indexed in this area are those in which the three relevant concepts are more frequently used together

▪ In most of the papers, co-production and co-creation are used, almost interchangeably, to refer to the citizen’s involvement in collaborative activities for developing tools, applications and solutions.

▪ The involvement of citizens as active participants in innovation initiatives in smart cities is sometimes referred to as co-creation of innovation and sometimes as co-production of innovation.

Discussion

Papers indexed in the Economy and Business areas

▪ In the papers indexed in the two areas related to economy, the concepts of co-production and co-design are used very rarely.

▪ In the papers that mention both co-creation and co-production the two concepts are used as interchangeably to refer to the collaborative development of services

Discussion

Papers indexed in the Engineering area

▪ In the papers indexed in this area co-design and co-creation are used to refer to technical components of the smart city infrastructure, without giving a precise definition of the concepts

Papers indexed in the Computer Science area▪ In the papers indexed in this area, co-creation and co-

design are mentioned without any further consideration of the concepts.

▪ Coproduction is related to open innovation and to the adoption of a model of service co-development in which end-users become collaborative co-producers

Conclusions

▪ The concepts of co-creation, co-production and co-design are used quite scarcely within the smart city academic literature.

▪ Many papers argue for a user-centric perspective in smart city initiatives but only few papers relate user-centricity and citizens’ empowerment to co-production and co-creation

▪ Even less are the papers that consider the problem of how to re-distribute responsibility and redefine the power relationship between public officials and citizens

▪ The papers considered fail to distinguish between participation, as a general term, and co-creation, co-production and co-design as forms of enhanced participation in which some power is given to citizens.

Conclusions

▪ Co-creation and co-production are widely used interchangeably and this a direct consequence of a poor conceptualization.

▪ Almost all the cases described as co-creation, co-production or co-design simply amount to consultation exercises in which, at most, citizens are involved in the design phase

A better conceptualization of co-creation, co-production and co-design is needed.

The identification of some critical aspects that still need a conceptual clarification can be considered as the main

contribution of this exploratory study.

Limitations of the study

▪ in the selection phase no iteration of the search through backward or forward snowball has been performed. This could affect the completeness of the sample considered and limit the relevance of the conclusions of the study

▪ to restrict the results of the full text search, a set of filters have been used (government, governance, citizens, public service(s)) that could appear excessively restrictive.

▪ Only papers published in indexed journals have been considered. This to could appear excessively restrictive, especially considering that the scientific and academic debate on smart cities has not reached a maturity stage yet. In fact, many relevant contributions to the debate can be found in conference proceedings, working papers and in the grey literature