Smart City Development as a Complex System: an Investigation of Citizens’ Involvement

This thesis aims to investigate Smart City development by empirically understanding how the development is presented and actualised, and how the competing interests of corporates, officials and citizens are addressed. This thesis perceives Smart City (SC) development as a complex, interrelated and unique system that is macro and on a large scale and needs citizen involvement in both development and implementation. While literature has shown that citizens and their involvement are key in SC development, it has also shown simultaneously that citizens are neglected in the process. This is the development of a cyber-physical system where citizens’ involvement would be beneficial for effective design. This thesis utilises document analysis, observation and interviews in a qualitative approach that is underpinned by an interpretivist philosophy. A total of 46 interviews were conducted, 12 hours of meetings were observed, and 32 documents were obtained. This resulted in over 70,000 words of text which were analysed. Overall, this thesis contributes to knowledge by showing that there is a shift between SC development as artefact and as process, and this shift changes the characteristics of SC development in different ways. The former shows that SC is developed based on plans and visions where citizens are empowered, whereas the latter demonstrates that individual projects within the larger SC project are selected based on the desire of those other than citizens in many cases. This has led to a theoretical contribution where citizens’ involvement is conceptualised into three categories. These categories are connected to different elements (method, development, organisation and outcome) which are used to understand the SC development.