Smart Cities and Forced Trust : Citizens’ Attitudes Towards Smart City Innovations

Abstract

Smart cities are cities that implement smart innovations and applications to improve the everyday-life of their citizens. Innovations can be, for instance smart infrastructure, smart education, smart governance, smart healthcare and smart citizens. The different dimensions of smart cities are human dimension, technological dimension and institutional dimension. The smart city we will observe in this thesis, is the city of Salo, which is a small smart city on a world’s scale. The city of Salo is implementing smart systems and innovations, and the question we wanted to ask is, how the citizens see innovations, when their trust is forced. We created a survey questionnaire which tries to help understanding citizens’ attitudes towards new smart applications. At first, we did a literature review on trust and forced trust and tried to solve the ethics of the latter. The second part was to create the survey questionnaire for the citizens of Salo and to expand it to cover other participants in Finland. The results showed that there weren’t a lot of differences between gender groups. However, between the age groups there were some differences, when it came to the factor of forced trust. Most of the comparison groups also saw forced trust as a supposition and non-optional factor when they had to place their trust in technologies.