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3.3.1 Interactions between cities and people

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed a model to
describe the types of interaction between a government and the people. This model can be
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adapted to smart cities. The model describes three levels of interaction: Information only, where
information is provided from the government to residents, consultation, where government consults
residents to ask their opinions, and participation where government and residents work together
to co-create smart interventions.

Some of the ways that cities can interact with people are given in Table 2.

Table 2: Modes of interaction between cities and residents

Information only Consultation Participation
• Public document repositories • Town meetings (physical or • Open data portals that allow
and informational websites virtual) with opportunities to people to use city data to
• Newsletters in physical or discuss issues draw conclusions about city
electronic forms • Interactive websites functioning
• Blogs, webcasts, podcasts • Polls on specific issues, • Workshops, brainstorms,
hackathons and co-creation
• Customer service centres or outbound call centres events around specific issues
kiosks (physical or virtual) • Active discussion forums
• Inbound call centres • Responsive social network • Community interest groups
and networks
• Interactive voice response (IVR) accounts • Apps that allow residents to
systems • Apps that collect data from contribute to city initiatives
residents
• Resident-driven initiatives

The World Economic Forum encourages what they call a ‘inhabitant-centric’ approach within
cities. Often, consultants, politicians and businesses are included in decision-making in cities,
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while other inhabitants are overlooked. This can lead to initiatives being implemented which fail
due to resident’s dissatisfaction. Consultation or better still, active participation, can ensure more
sustainable results with residents who are generators of ideas, services and solutions, rather than
subservient and passive recipients of them.

Smart technologies enable cities to effectively connect their inhabitants to each other, connecting
both their human intelligence and their smart devices into an underlying, invisible ‘computer’ of
modern urban life. Such technologies can collect data from residents about what city services they
use and how, and this data can be used to inform city planning. However, to ensure trust these
activities need to be transparent, and cities need to seek permission from residents to collect and
use their data.

One danger in databases collected from services, surveys or social media is the risk of social
representation bias. Cities can use effective policies to mitigate this risk by, for example, ensuring that
city databases are based on representative and balanced samples of people belonging to different

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