Exploring the Smart City Adoption Process: Evidence from the Belgian urban context

Abstract: In this position paper, we explore the adoption of a Smart City with a socio-technical perspective. A Smart city is a transformational technological process leading to profound modifications of existing urban regimes and infrastructure components. In this study, we consider a Smart City as a socio-technical system where the interplay between technologies and users ensures the sustainable development of smart city initiatives that improve the quality of life and solve important socio-economic problems. The adoption of a Smart City required a participative approach where users are involved during the adoption process to joint optimise both systems. Thus, we contribute to socio-technical research showing how a participative approach based on press relationships to facilitate information exchange between municipal actors and citizens worked as a success factor for the smart city adoption. We also discuss the limitations of this approach.