Abstract
Cities across the world continuously face emerging complexities driven by rapid urbanisation, socio-economic shifts and environmental pressures. Navigating these challenges effectively necessitates continuous adaptation and innovation, moving beyond traditional smart city approaches towards more sustainable citizen-centric transformations of cities through contextual citizen-centric innovation and development. For such transformations, cities need to be viewed holistically as innovation ecosystems that can learn from internal interactions and external influences. However, a research gap exists in understanding how cities could learn as ecosystems and how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could be purposefully designed to support this systemic learning by cities. In this PhD research, the ecosystemic learning by a city has been termed as "city learning", wherein a city itself, as an innovation ecosystem, learns and adapts through the interactions of all its relevant elements for driving contextually relevant innovations to ensure sustainable citizen-centric transformations.
This PhD thesis addresses this research gap by investigating two primary research questions: 1) What is city learning wherein cities can learn as innovation ecosystems for their sustainable citizen-centric transformations? and 2) How can ICT support city learning?
This research makes three key contributions. Firstly, it provides a conceptualisation of city learning defined through the lens of innovation ecosystems through a systemic understanding of city ecosystems. Secondly, it develops and validates a conceptual framework for city learning. This framework comprises two parts: i) a conceptual model providing a high-level ecosystem view for understanding city learning, and ii) a mapping of key elements and processes that illustrates the interactions that could drive city learning. Furthermore, a board game has been designed based on the conceptual model for understanding city learning and the key elements and processes that could drive city learning. The board game is designed to promote and enhance the understanding, communication and exploration of city learning concepts. Thirdly, synthesising the findings based on the conceptual model for understanding city learning and the mapping of key elements and processes that can drive city learning, this research presents high-level ICT requirements to support city learning. Based on the analysis of the high-level ICT requirements, a technical design idea has been presented through: i) demonstrative blueprints of ICT services and ii) a high-level service architecture of ICT services to meet the high-level requirements for ICT solutions to support city learning. This high-level service architecture of ICT services design focuses on facilitating key learning processes such as citizen participation, multi-stakeholder communication and transparency. Adopting the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology as the overarching methodology for this research, it integrates insights from multiple methods, including scoping and systematic literature reviews, case studies of European city neighbourhood projects, an expert interview and a focus group workshop session. This research makes primary contributions in the area of Information Systems, which could support the design of sustainable citizen-centric transformations of cities through the insights from: i) city learning based on the understanding of contextual requirements, resources, challenges and opportunities and ii) the high-level ICT requirements and service architecture of ICT services to effectively support city learning.