Towards a Digital Ecosystem for a Smart City District: Procedure, Results, and Lessons Learned

The digital transformation supports many cities on the way to becoming smarter cities, enabling them to enhance digital processes, care about climate-friendly goals, or improve the quality of life of their citizens. However, such changes usually take place step by step and not in a big-bang approach. In order for the direction of the digital transformation to be defined, it is necessary to know and understand the needs and requirements of all relevant stakeholders who will be affected or are intended to use the new digital solutions. As our environment, a smart city district, is currently under construction, we do not know most of the future stakeholders yet. Therefore, we had to find new ways of eliciting the needs and requirements for digital solutions without knowing, e.g., the citizens who will live in the future district. We show a framework of the procedures we followed, classified into (a) vision and concepts, (b) smart city district digital ecosystem, and (c) dissemination and events. We substantiate the processes with example results and provide a discussion on how we evaluate our solutions with respect to future applicability. Because evaluations are only very limited in our setting right now, we focus on four lead questions to argue why the procedures and results are adequate and share the lessons we learned on this path towards a digital smart city district.