Citizen Participation in A Smart City: The Seoul Case

Abstract

The ultimate objective of governments that adopt the smart city approach is to improve the living conditions of citizens. Therefore, the realization of the smart city vision is largely an issue related to citizens. Thus, the increasing success of smart cities that become prominent in the world by effectively ensuring citizen engagement beyond prioritizing the technology use attests to this. This study aims to reveal the role and importance of citizen participation in smart cities within the framework of the example of Seoul Smart City, the capital of South Korea. In this context, the prominent citizen participation practices and features of the Seoul smart city are mentioned. In the study, which was created with the qualitative method, a descriptive method was used in the direction of the literature review, the information about the smart city on the website of Seoul Municipality, and the information from the Digital City plans. According to the results of the study, it has been seen that the Seoul Municipality has succeeded in increasing citizen participation with the mobile applications implemented in Seoul, which facilitate the education of citizens. However, it has been determined that there are still insufficient field study examples showing the level of influence of bottom-up decisions in Seoul.