Thinking Smart: Understanding citizen acceptance of smart technologies in future cities

The sustainability challenges that are threatening cities are increasingly being tackled through the use of smart technologies. These smart technologies have implications for the citizen; however, the current discussions of smart citizens within the extant literature were found to be abstract and limited in their considerations. The aim of this thesis, therefore was to explore the smart citizen concept, from a psychological perspective, in terms of factors influencing smart energy technology acceptance.
Study 1 investigated the smart city and smart citizen in order to gain further understanding of the current issues and potential challenges. As such, interviews were conducted with UK city stakeholders who were involved in smart city initiatives. Overall, they felt that citizens should sharing the goals for smart city developments and pursuing goals for the collective benefit.
Studies 2a and 2b used the extended technology acceptance model (TAM2) in conjunction with psychological empowerment, environmental concern, and environmental citizenship to predict participants’ intention to use a home energy management system (HEMS) to engage in either energy reduction (2a) or load shifting (2b). Study 3, used the same factors to again explore acceptance of the HEMS, however the HEMS and load shifting were then framed with either a gain goal-frame or a normative goal-frame, as per goal-framing theory. The framing of the information across the studies lead to different factors being significant in each of the predictive models.
This thesis concludes that internalised goals may undermine the effect of more individualistic concerns for intention to use a HEMS. As such, the internalisation of wider collective national or city goals by citizens will be a critical aspect of citizen engagement and empowerment within the smart city and is likely to be important in supporting the roll out of smart technology and the achievement of the smart city strategies.