Building Participatory Smart Cities Through Aware Citizens: Evidence from Argentina

Paper by María Verónica Alderete: “A smart city approach places citizens at the center of decision-making. However, only a small proportion of citizens actually engage in participatory initiatives. Although citizen participation has been extensively studied, limited empirical evidence exists on how citizens’ awareness of participatory initiatives relates to both their participation and their perception of municipal efforts to promote participation. This paper analyses these relationships using a Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach based on survey data from a medium-sized city in Argentina. Since the factors associated with participation and perceptions of municipal promotion may also shape citizens’ awareness of government programs, PSM is used to improve comparability between aware and non-aware citizens and to examine the association between awareness of participatory initiatives and participation outcomes. The results show statistically significant differences in both participation propensity and perceptions of municipal promotion between citizens who are aware of these initiatives and those who are not. Awareness is positively associated with prior civic engagement, visiting the municipal website and age, and negatively associated with being a woman. Policy implications highlight the importance of disseminating successful participatory experiences and strengthening communication strategies to encourage broader citizen engagement…(More)”.