Co-creating a Smart City strategic roadmap for small-sized cities: insights from a Swiss case study

Digital innovations are increasingly acknowledged as powerful enablers of the transition towards overall more sustainable urban contexts, under the framework of smart city interventions. If properly designed, in fact, they can help to build a more efficient and liveable urban environment. Different countries have therefore launched plans to promote the development of smart city strategies within their territory. While past experiences of smart city processes mostly focused on technological optimization of infrastructures and services, recent trends in the smart city domain call for increasingly participatory co-creation processes, capable of moving people and governance issues to the core of innovative city services. In large cities and metropolitan areas, such processes usually engage key stakeholders. In small cities, instead, city managers also have the opportunity to directly engage with the population. How can citizen and local actors be engaged in such smart city processes? Which are the opportunities and limitations associated with their direct involvement? In this paper, we tackle these questions by presenting and discussing the methodological framework adopted by the Swiss small city Mendrisio (about 15'000 inhabitants), that in 2019 launched a participatory process for the co-design of the “Mendrisio Smart City Strategic Roadmap”.