New publication by Max Schindler and Emese Domahidi on the value of sharing in online forums on the city.

With more than half of the world's population living in urban areas, the smart city concept has been proposed as a solution to the challenges of urbanization, focusing on technological and social innovation. Yet critics argue that this concept is more about marketing than actual citizen concerns. Given the limitations of traditional e-participation and smart city practices, the paper emphasizes the value of shared citizen knowledge and the potential of e-interaction in this context by analyzing city-related informal communication in social media, thus following recent calls to incorporate citizen opinions into the smart city framework. Their work focuses on the subreddits of major German cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants.

Max Schindler and Emese Domahidi identify nine categories that are of particular interest in citizen discussions. In contrast to cities' official social media channels, citizens tend to focus on social and societal issues. The findings of this study can complement existing tools by incorporating citizens' perspectives into the decision-making processes of smart cities, contributing to a more participatory and citizen-centric design of these smart cities.

Here is the link to the publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448231187032