Citizen engagement in focus in annual East Asia Regional Office event

December 9, 2021

SEOUL – WeGO hosted an online event with Chengdu East Asia Regional Office and the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) to shed light on the importance of building citizen-centric smart cities.

Entitled “Co-creation of Empowering Smart Cities through Citizen Engagement Webinar”, the webinar convened representatives from Asia and Europe to share examples of innovative citizen engagement measures that best suit certain local contexts, and shed light on how citizen engagement can lead to the implementation of services in accordance with the specified needs of local communities.

On the topic, Dafeng Subdistrict from Chengdu Municipality spoke about Chengdu’s focus on the use of smart technology to engage different stakeholders in the day-to-day management of communities. Similarly, the Founder and Director of I You She Community Development Center illustrated how the organization utilizes online tools to facilitate community activities.

The Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA), the national institution in charge of Thailand’s smart city development, elaborated on several citizen centric approaches that are applied across Thailand and laid out the core values of those initiatives. Finally, ENoLL explained how living labs can be used to build more citizen-centric cities and presented key case studies. 

Five students from Chulalongkorn University, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and East China Normal University, also participated to share their perspective on how smart cities can further improve the quality of lives of people through varied initiatives that are derived from the perspective of citizens.

WeGO’s East Asia Regional Office Chengdu normally provides a capacity-building program every year which consists in a one-week program with lectures and on-site visits to learn from Chengdu’s smart city best practice. However, due to the extended travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year the program was replaced by the above-mentioned webinar.

The webinar and presentation materials are available on WeGO’s website.