Opening up Smart Cities: Citizen-Centric Challenges and Opportunities from GIScience

The holy grail of smart cities is an integrated, sustainable approach to improve the efficiency of the city’s operations and the quality of life of citizens. At the heart of this vision is the citizen, who is the primary beneficiary of smart city initiatives, either directly or indirectly. Despite the recent surge of research and smart cities initiatives in practice, there are still a number of challenges to overcome in realizing this vision. This position paper points out six citizen-related challenges: the engagement of citizens, the improvement of citizens’ data literacy, the pairing of quantitative and qualitative data, the need for open standards, the development of personal services, and the development of persuasive interfaces. The article furthermore advocates the use of methods and techniques from GIScience to tackle these challenges, and presents the concept of an Open City Toolkit as a way of transferring insights and solutions from GIScience to smart cities.This work has been funded by the European Commission through the GEO-C project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement number 642332, http://www.geo-c.eu/). Carlos Granell and Sven Casteleyn have been partly funded by the Ramón y Cajal Programme (grant numbers RYC-2014-16913 and RYC-2014-16606 respectively). The authors thank Carl Schultz and Malumbo Chipofya who assisted in proofreading the article, and the rest of the GEO-C consortium (PhD students, scholars, and associate partners) for their valuable discussions over the past months on the topic of the paper