How Publics Perceive Smart Cities: Identifying Social Determinants of Citizen’s Attitudes

The limited citizen engagement in the development of the ‘smart city’ is often ascribed to a lack of interest of citizens, whose attitudes and perceptions are assumed to relate negatively to the highly technological and complex digital developments within a smart city. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this argument. Hence, this presentation attempts to develop comprehensive scientific knowledge about citizens' attitudes and perceptions on the 'smart city', understood as an “incorporation of digital technologies in urban life to render efficient city operations and enhance citizens’ quality of life”.

Using Flemish survey data (n=3270), we researched how citizen's attitudes towards smart cities are socially determined by focusing on socio-demographic, cognitive, and affective factors. Attitudes tend to be more positive for older, higher educated and male respondents. The effects of gender and education become negligible once other cognitive and affective variables are considered. Among different cognitive categories; awareness, digital literacy and (prior) technology adoption, only the latter significantly affects attitudes. This indicates that it is not formal knowledge about smart cities that shapes attitudes, but rather that attitudes are constructed through experience and acquaintance with different technologies provided by smart cities. Moreover, the strongest associations can be found on the affective level. Whereas perceived risks concerning social replacement are not significant, perceived risks concerning misuse emerge as significant determinants. Particularly we notice that perceived benefits strongly outweigh perceived risks in citizen's assessments of smart cities. Overall these results indicate that attitudes towards the real-world implementation of 'smart cities' are shaped more by affective responses rather than through cognitive evaluation. As such the results open for a debate concerning the multiple natures of sense-making-processes about technoscience.