Citizen Engagement in a Smart City: A Case Study of Phuket, Thailand

Abstract

Citizen engagement is a crucial strategy in smart city development. This study highlights how citizen engagement contributes to smart city initiatives and outcomes. The study examined how smart city projects worldwide engaged citizen and dug deeper into the citizen engagement process using Phuket, Thailand as a case study. The research used a pragmatic approach comprising of a desktop research, observations, semi-structure interviews and surveys. The data included 123 articles on Scopus documents between 2014 and 2019 with updated documents in 2021,17 official smart city websites, observation notes from 49 Phuket smart city and related meetings, 12 stakeholder interviews and 409 questionnaires collected during April to September 2018. The findings compose of five parts following five research questions. The first question on citizen engagement as part a characteristic of a smart city is addressed through causal loop diagrams of citizen engagement in a smart city framework and its subsystems. The second question on the usage of open data platforms in relation to citizen engagement highlights four main purposes namely environmental monitoring and management, city data service, citizen feedback, and citizen support and empowerment. The third question analyzes and classifies the citizen engagement strategies from 17 smart cities before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The fourth question describes how citizen engagement was perceived and contributed to the evolution of Phuket smart city development. The last question shows the level of awareness and engagement of Phuket residents in Phuket smart city. The study concludes that active citizen engagement requires participatory governance and collaborative culture of all stakeholders, especially youth, elderly and marginalized groups in order to ensure smart city implementation that is inclusive and socially. Meaningful efforts to improve the trust and interactive communication between city administrators and citizen need to be prioritized as a central process guiding the smart city planning and development.