Co-creation of sustainable smart cities: Users, participation and service design

The starting point of this paper is to develop new ubiquitous and participative services for sustainable urban planning using mixed reality and other relevant technologies. To support communication between stakeholders, we have created a demo service that can be situated in public places such as interactive displays, designed for community content sharing, close to people flows in cities. It can also be used in public planning events as well as anywhere with personal devices. The service combines visualizations and virtual environments by mixing panoramic imaging and architectural drawings of future urban plans, and includes user-centred interactions such as questionnaires and commenting tools. In this paper, we focus on social issues and the implications of this kind of services, especially trying to understand user values, needs and preferences in participative urban planning service. Political decision makers, city officials and citizens participated in this research to clarify how they perceive the new digital concepts, and how these digital services should be designed and offered for users to support public participation and collaboration in future urban planning projects. Important changes in urban planning would be to increase information and communication and present more alternatives at the early stages of projects. According to the different stakeholders involved in this research, informing the public how their feedback has been taken into consideration and developing real-time feedback channels would enhance participatory urban planning.