The effects of successful ICT-based smart city services: From citizens' perspectives

Highlights

• ICT-based smart city services increase citizens overall quality of life.

• The more usage of the ICT-based smart city services, the higher the quality of life achieved.

• Citizens' accepting and using ICT-based smart city services can be influenced by their social groups.

• ICT-based smart city service should focus on service quality, innovation concepts, and the protection of users' privacy.

Abstract

The adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) applications for the development of innovative, sustainable, and smart cities has become a new model for municipal cooperation between government and corporations. Smart cities contribute to social stability and economic prosperity by encouraging and enabling corporations to invest their resources and expertise in the cities, and by providing more prosperity and contentment for their citizens. Smart city services provide citizens with an improved living environment and increase their overall quality of life. Since the citizens are the users of the services, it is vitally important that their ideas and perspectives are taken into account during the planning and management of such services. This study surveyed citizens in Taiwanese cities that had all participated in the Intelligent Community Forum smart city campaigns at least once. The findings reveal that citizens are willing to accept and use ICT-based smart city services if the services are designed with innovative concepts that secure their privacy and offer a high quality of services. The more they use the services, the higher the quality of life achieved. The only factor that does not influence citizens' acceptance and usage of ICT-based smart city services is their city engagement. The study contributes to the academic literature and also provides practical pointers for cities and technology suppliers embarking on smart city initiatives.

Introduction

According to Caragliu et al. (2011), a city is designated as smart if it balances economic, social, and environmental development, and if it links up to democratic processes through a participatory government. Cities, but also less urbanized regions and the countryside can all benefit from Smart City (SC) services that actively engage citizens in smarter, participatory governance of their regions (Kickbusch and Gleicher, 2014). Nowadays, city governments worldwide make their economic development policies with the aim of building advanced infrastructure and implementing SC initiatives, and this has become a priority on the list of their municipal goals.

There is emerging agreement that the adoption of technology in a country contributes to greater national GDP and higher wages, compared to workers with similar skills in other countries (Beaudry and Green, 2002, Comin and Hobijn, 2004, Foster and Rosenzweig, 2010). A country's adoption of a new technology leverages its national wealth because technology expedites the production of goods and services, eventually facilitating economic growth and improving the perceived standard of living (Comin and Hobijn, 2008). Foster and Rosenzweig (2010) argued that a shortcut for poorer countries with slow-growing economies to catch up with the richer ones is through the use of advanced technologies. As a concept, SC is described in various ways, but a general definition involves the implementation and deployment of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures to support social and urban growth through improving the economy, citizens' involvement and government efficiency. Based on the new digital layer of SC services, the cities are not only smarter, but they also serve the mobile citizen in a better way. As stated by Neirotti et al. (2014), cities equipped with ICT implementations may not necessarily be labeled as better cities, but that these implementations can result in intermediate outputs that reflect their SC initiatives by providing their citizens with an improved and smarter way of living.

The SC literature agrees that very smart services, identified by Giffinger et al. (2007) as the “smartness footprint” in cities are meant to improve the living environment and the overall quality of life of citizens (e.g., Lee et al., 2014, Piro et al., 2014, Yigitcanlar and Lee, 2014). More specifically, smart cities strive to create the foundations for human-centric and sustainable socio-economic wellbeing and quality of life (Kulkki, 2014), for example, ICT applications for the management of intelligent transportation systems, natural resources, energy, water monitoring, building, agglomeration and sprawl management, as well as online education and ICT applications for health care and city safety, e-service delivery, e-democracy and participation in the public sectors. Hence, the development of urban management to meet citizens' current needs and demands, and fostering actual and fluent interrelation among citizens to improve their quality of life through ICT-based SC services can be considered to be a successful implementation.

SC services provide wider coverage than e-government operations. According to an ISO report regarding smart cities in 2014, as a prerequisite for the development of SCs, adopting ICT applications in e-government enables citizens to communicate with all levels of government, improving and enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of their involvement in the governance of the public sectors. With horizontal and vertical integration across various e-government initiatives, such as the development of transactional authentication systems and data collection/sharing of citizens and businesses, cities will increasingly improve the contribution of more stakeholders to a broad range of public and private SC services.

This study investigated the factors of the ICT-based SC services of government applications that lead to the improvement in its citizens' quality of life, particularly from the perspective of the citizens. After a review of the literature and an overview of the research hypotheses, a framework for the study is presented. Structured equation model (SEM) analysis was adopted to examine the validity of the proposed framework. Finally, based on the findings, practical implications, and suggestions for future study are recommended.