Participative foresight for smarter cities : from vision seeds to the development of scenarios

Recently, the smart city concepts have gained increasing importance in current energy and city planning. Various smart city projects which have been realized show that a systemic, integrative approach is crucial. However, in the projects the delineation of boundaries for integrative planning and the realization of systemic local solutions are challenging as the prevailing conventional planning tools and routines are limited. They usually propose top-down and short-term approaches with limited interactions with the stakeholders and limited interdisciplinary research (in particular involving areas of sociology). To tackle these challenges, a Swiss-Russian cooperation aims to enhance the existing planning routines by developing and testing systemic tools for multi-level stakeholder participation processes as well as for future-oriented thinking in city development. For this purpose, two Swiss and two Russian cities were selected, namely Winterthur, Zurich, Moscow and Kazan. These cities will be examined from the smart cities perspective with current and future applications at different implementation levels. Ideas and instruments will be developed to support their ongoing or planned smart city projects at district or city level by introducing participative and long term perspectives