The Role of Community Engagement in Urban Innovation Towards the Co-Creation of Smart Sustainable Cities

TLDR

Community engagement is a central focus in smart city research, with industry and academia exploring its approaches and tools. This study argues that community engagement drives knowledge acquisition and innovation, fostering equitable, socially sustainable communities. The authors conducted a semi‑systematic review of 71 Web of Science and Scopus articles, extracting and synthesizing secondary data for narrative and descriptive analysis. The study presents a model outlining factors that promote community engagement for smart sustainable city development, demonstrating how stakeholders can collaborate to co‑create services and offering recommendations to build resilient, inclusive, technology‑driven urban spaces.

Abstract

Abstract One of the most recent topics in smart cities is community engagement which has been generally deliberated in both industrial and academic literature around the approaches and tools employed in urban environment. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to advocate for community engagement as a key driver that supports the acquisition of knowledge and requirements needed for innovation and creativity towards achieving an equitable community for social sustainability. A semi-systematic review method is adopted to analyze 71 sources from Web of Science and Scopus databases. Secondary data from the literature is extracted and synthesized to provide narrative and descriptive analysis. Findings from this study presents a developed model that can support community engagement for urban innovation by specifying factors that influences community engagement for smart sustainable city development. The model enables citizens, policy makers, government, urban planners, academics, and enterprises in urban environment to connect, interact, engage, and co-create innovative services. More importantly findings from this research provides theoretical evidence on administrative and non-administrative stakeholder’s involvement towards co-creation of urban services towards smart sustainable cities. Furthermore, this study provides recommendation on how community engagement perspective involving different stakeholders can help to achieve resilient technological driven city by supporting sustainable development and ultimately actualizing a socially inclusive urban space.