Developing Smart Sustainable City Services: Towards Actor Engagement Approach

The ongoing shift towards urbanisation requires new kinds of cities. Smart Sustainable Cities (SSCs) aim to solve problems caused by rapid urbanisation and climate change with the help of digital innovations. Until now, research and practice have mainly focused on using ICT to make cities more functional while overlooking the social and environmental challenges of urbanisation. Considering the complex nature of these challenges, we must incorporate various technical, social, and environmental issues while developing SSC services. To that end, following Design Science Research, we propose the Actor Engagement Approach (AEA). Drawing on the participatory design and urban analytics literature and conducting ten semi-structured interviews with smart city experts, we developed and demonstrated the feasibility of the AEA iteratively. As such, we contribute to IS research and practice by proposing a novel artefact and a set of theoretically informed and empirically grounded design principles for developing SSC solutions.