ABSTRACT
Whilst a plethora of research exists on smart cities and project performance evaluations, only a few studies have focused on the smart city policy evaluation from the perspective of its acceptance by practitioners. This chapter aims to generate insights by evaluating smart city policy through a developing country case study—i.e., Malaysia. This study employed a questionnaire survey method for data collection and analysed the data by using fuzzy Delphi analysis. A group of 40 practitioners was gathered in a focus group discussion through purposive sampling. The main objectives of this survey were to identify the understanding and acceptance levels of the seven smart city domains and respective strategies that are outlined in the Malaysian Smart City Framework. The results disclosed that the practitioners possessed divergent levels of understanding and acceptance in terms of smart city domains. The study participant practitioners accepted all understanding and acceptance objectives of smart economy, living, people, and governance domains, but rejected all objectives for both smart environment and digital infrastructure domains. Along with this, acceptance of smart mobility was also rejected. The findings reveal that considering all opinions expressing dissensus is essential when building more inclusive smart city strategies. This chapter contributes to the smart city discourse as one of the first in capturing professional practitioners’ understanding and acceptance on a national level of smart city policy by applying the Delphi method in the smart city context.
