*2.2. Criticism and Emergence of Citizens-Centric Smart City*

Over the past decade, the concept of a smart city has changed its focus on infrastructure to a focus on citizens, which brought some projects—both ongoing and completed—under criticism.

For example, Masdar of Abu Dhabi, so called Smart City 1.0, was criticized for lacking sustainability of the project itself [36], and the business model for the city of Songdo in South Korea came under criticism for its employment of the top-down methodology that is frequently used for existing ubiquitous cities, as well as for its failure to achieve stated economic and social goals [37,38]. Other cases have also been cited for their lack of educational programs and services for citizens to induce their practical participation in smart city projects [25]. Such criticism has sparked controversies as well as new implications in two perspectives:

First, such criticism is based on differences in the perception of a smart city in the past and at present. As mentioned above, recent studies see citizens as a key element of the smart city in the era of Smart City 2.0 or above, but the so-called first-generation smart cities, presented from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, were meant to be experimental cities that introduced intelligent infrastructure with a goal to improving their technological and engineering performances. The notion has since undergone changes, such as a digital city, an intelligent city, a ubiquitous city, a knowledge city, and a sustainable city, by taking into consideration both technologies and human beings [39].

Therefore, smart city-based urban development and regeneration projects of the past did not review human (or citizen) factors [40,41] and ended up missing technologies, facilities and services that citizens directly experience and use [42,43], which became a source of criticism.

Second, critics focus on incomplete smart city projects due to their "excessive" futureoriented perspectives. The authors of [44,45] claimed that current smart city projects are concentrating only on the introduction of new technologies while failing to fully consider how to contribute to making a civil society, and to guaranteeing its sustainability. However, they may have overlooked the fact that ongoing smart city projects bear high chances of being modified over the course of their execution. Especially when a project is kicked off from scratch to combine the development of a new town or city with smart city infrastructures, it will take quite a long time before the urban space is equipped with human and material resources to have it actually serve its due role. In addition, changes in

financial situations, such as planned budget; urban-, architectural-, and information-related policies; and political circumstances could become a considerable stumbling block to the completion of well-organized smart cities both in internal and external terms, just as many theories and studies have pointed out. In this regard, any criticism against smart city projects should be made based on goals pursued by each city. Its focus also needs to be on whether a city is being created to meet the needs of its actual users.

Taken the above-mentioned points together, the criticism for established smart cities was due largely to different viewpoints among studies. There are limitations to fitting a wide spectrum of notions into a singular notion of an "ideal" smart city. However, those critics are on the same page in that they emphasize the lack of attention to citizens and civil societies [46,47], and call for providing appropriate technologies, facilities, and services for users [48]. In this context, it is necessary to establish evaluation criterion which fully considers citizens, and this will be a way to promote the sustainability of many smart city projects in the future [49]. Studies on citizens who reside in places where smart city projects have already been implemented can be a starting point to achieve the citizens-centric smart city in real terms.

#### **3. Research Methodology and Materials**
