Digital Co-Creation in Socially Sustainable Smart City Projects: Lessons From the European Union and Canada

Utilizing readily accessible information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile devices, applications, and simple Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and harnessing their potential through Experimentation as a Service (EaaS), crowdsensing, and gamification, represents one of the most effective approaches to implementing co-creation in smart cities. The benefits of this bottom-up approach are closely related to accurately identifying the real needs of city residents and increasing the chances of designing and implementing solutions with genuine impact, ensuring equity, social inclusion, sustainability, and community resilience. This paper investigates the utilization of ICTs to support social sustainability by analyzing 157 smart city projects funded under the Horizon 2020 program at the European Union level and 5 smart city projects from Canada. The results reveal the utilization of technological solutions such as testbeds, living labs, EaaS, crowdsensing, open data, and more for co-creation in smart city projects. In the discussion part, we point out the importance of focusing on technologies that are familiar to the beneficiaries and on leveraging resources already available as wearable devices or in the citizens’ homes, the versatility of the technological solutions analyzed, the role of heterogeneous and open data, and cross-disciplinary teams in creating new perspectives on urban problems, reducing inequity in the development of solutions to solve them. The concerns raised and problems reported relate to the technology itself (errors in operation), users (difficulties in stimulating their involvement and keeping it constant), and data (quality of data collected, difficult to process, ethics and security of data collection and use). Based on our results, we extract, synthetize and present six distinct categories of lessons learned by the implementation teams of the analyzed projects.