Leveraging smart city projects for benefitting citizens: The role of ICTs

The scientific literature converges in indicating better life conditions for citizens as the smart city’s main goal. To achieve this goal, cities leverage different technologies and especially ICT to modify urban infrastructures, public and private services and governance activities. However, smart programs often target the use and experimentation of innovative technologies, whilst citizens are considered as the passive addressees of technological programs. To verify whether smart projects really pursue citizens’ well-being, an extensive empirical survey has been conducted. The research investigates 366 European smart city projects and extracts 42 ICT-enabled projects explicitly focusing on citizens. The analysis sheds light on the complex goal of citizens’ well-being improvement in smart cities and on the most promising ICT solutions to impact urban life conditions. A special focus regards the use of IoT in smart projects addressing the citizens’ well-being.