Smart City – Does Smartness Render a City More Attractive as a Location of Study and Work?

Abstract

One of the main opportunities of smart cities is to enable new types of stakeholders, such as newcomers to communities or students, especially foreign students, to become more empowered in their communities. But at the same time, the challenge is how to motivate them to become active citizens, so that they would invest their time in participating in the development of the smart city and its services. In this context, we have researched how important the smart city functionalities are for the students and does the smart city image make a city more attractive when choosing a place to study or work. The research includes a survey with new/international students from three different Universities of Applied Sciences about relevant smart city themes, including smart mobility, smart services, smart governance and smart utilities. We have analyzed the collected material both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to find the main topics that are relevant for students in order to detect weak signals for urban planning. The key findings of the survey and workshop indicate that while all the respondents are actively using multiple smart city technologies and think they can positively boost a city’s attractiveness, smart city image is still rarely a decisive factor when students are choosing a place to study or work. The students had also several new ideas how smart city technologies could improve the quality of their lives. The aim is to make research data available for urban planning, in general, and education and work communities, in particular.