**1. Introduction**

To date, considering citizens' perceptions about and perspectives of smart city development is seen as a sound strategy for many political and administrative leaders. Particularly, this has taken the form of promoting eGov (citizen centricity in e-government) that has been upheld in Europe since the mid-2000s [1] and is rooted in the perspective of "citizens as customers" under the new public management [2]. Based on this influence, apart from technological needs or smart cities, in recent years, city administrators have shifted their focus to co-creating smart cities with their citizens [3–6].

The rhetorical smart city visions in emerging and developing countries [7,8], such as the slogans of the federal government of Malaysia and the state government of Selangor's "Peduli Rakyat" (literally care for citizens) [9], have rightly inspired and motivated the general public, who are entirely depending on government resources or actions. Nevertheless, the targeted passive users, beneficiaries, or the public are unaware of their responsibilities, even though "citizen-centric smart city initiatives are rooted in stewardship, civic paternalism, and a neoliberal conception of citizenship" [10]. These neoliberal conceptions "prioritized choice of consumption and individual autonomy within a framework of state and corporate-defined constraints that focused on market-led solutions to urban issues,

**Citation:** Malek, J.A.; Lim, S.B.; Yigitcanlar, T. Social Inclusion Indicators for Building Citizen-Centric Smart Cities: A Systematic Literature Review. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*, 376. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13010376

Received: 11 October 2020 Accepted: 17 November 2020 Published: 4 January 2021

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rather than being grounded in civil, social, and political rights, and the common good" [10]. In other words, the market-led solutions put a high dependency on corporate technological sectors in most of the current forms of smart urban governance and tokenize the proactive response from users/citizens [11]. More so, [12] rightly pointed out that the citizen-centered idea is less compatible with neoliberalism because local governance needs to prioritize offering incentives to investors if it is to compete within the world system of cities.

Furthermore, in studies that investigated citizen centricity in smarter cities [13], the main interest was concentrated on measuring a citizen-centric approach by monitoring cities' abilities to safeguard citizenship rights. However, in a more holistic view of the citizenship regime [14], citizenship should include rights, governance practices, and citizens' responsibilities. Additionally, some recent studies [15,16] revealed that the current British Smart City Standards and the Malaysia Smart City Framework have an explicit citizenship rationale for guiding the standards and development of a smart city, although these guidelines displayed some substantial shortcomings and contradictions.

These shortcomings include superficial and unclear explanations of the citizenship regime in forming a citizen-centric smart city and contradictions in citizens' priorities against the profit gained from technological markets and the legitimacy of paternity governance. Hence, the social inclusion indicators that can provide clarity to the public and administrators in measuring the shortcomings and contradictions of building a citizencentric smart city need to be identified. As such, the research question that formed the study rationale was as follows: "What are the key social inclusion indicators supporting the emergence of a citizen-centric smart city?" With this question in mind and realizing the influence of neoliberal urbanism, this study aimed to identify the key indicators for citizen-centric smart cities from the perspective of participative governance practices and citizens' responsibilities.

Regarding the methodological approach, this study adopted a systematic literature review technique. Sound constructs detailing the items for building a citizen-centric smart city were scarce in the literature in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases, other than from the citizen's rights perspective, with some exceptions [13,17]. For scholars and practitioners sensitive to humanistic values in smart city construction, this article resembles a valuable starting point to quantify the popular yet vague and contested concept of citizen centricity in smart and future city development and governance. Thus, from the perspective of humanistic values, this review provided invaluable information to humanistic-conscious scholars and practitioners for realizing the importance of the participatory aspect of smart city development and governance [18–23].

This paper is structured as follows. The following sections include the introduction, the literary background on citizenship and citizen centricity practices in smart cities, governance practices and citizens' responsibilities, the introduction of theoretical and conceptual frameworks, the methodology of the systematic literature review and indicators' verification through interviews, the study findings, discussions, and conclusions.
