Estimating power of smart city Citizens

Smart city as a popular vision for future cities is still emerging, and the work of defining and conceptualizing it is in progress. Due to lack of an agreed definition, smart city is vague in many aspects such as citizen s power to make decisions and conduct city programs. Sherry Arnstein believed that citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power. Therefore, in order to estimate smart city citizen s power, the article superimposed Arnstein s ladder of citizen participation on collected smart city definitions. The results showed non-have citizens can come to power in smart city. They can enter into a partnership that enables them to negotiate and engage in trade-offs with traditional power-holders, obtain the power via elected delegates, or even make directly decisions in smart city.

Keywords:

smart city , participation , vision , Arnstein s ladder