Clarifying The Relationship Between Trust And Participation In Smart Cities: A Literature Review & Practical Typology

Smart city systems aim to improve quality of life for urban residents, but many projects have suffered from public backlash and mistrust, leading to implementation delays and failures. Many researchers have proposed greater levels of public involvement in the smart city projects to encourage their acceptance. Other authors have begun to investigate the role of trust in the acceptance of new urban sensing technologies, but there remains a need to clarify how participatory modalities might generate greater levels of trust in smart cities. In this paper, I first review the literature on trust in smart city projects and parallel calls for greater community participation in their development and operation. Drawing on the sociological literature on the topic, I go on to center the relational dimensions of trust, a move which I argue can aid in understanding how participatory approaches can function as opportunities for trust to emerge from below as city residents actively engage with smart city system experts, public administrators, and new technologies themselves. I go on to establish a practical typology of the competing conceptualizations of participation that appear in the smart city literature, identify opportunities for trust building unique to each, and highlight illustrative case studies. Lastly, I review challenges to the renewed emphasis on participation in the smart city, and I suggest lessons and new directions for smart city researchers and practitioners.