The Smart City Agenda and the Citizens: Perceptions from the St. Petersburg Experience

The paper contributes to literature on smart cities by focusing on the demand side of smart city projects. For this endeavor, the SCOT approach is used to describe the construction of the concept of Smart City from the perspective of the mass media agenda and, in particular, from citizens’ needs and expectations in the city of Saint Petersburg, in Russia. Authors used an automated tool to perform content analysis on 589 articles that discuss smart cities in the Russian media from 2010 to 2017 as well as a survey of 421 citizens in the city. Findings suggest that the prevalence of technical descriptions involving the Smart City topic do not reduce citizens’ interest in the phenomenon nor foster their willingness to participate in city management through ICT.