Facing socio-environmental and demographical issues, many cities opted for a “Smart City” strategy of development. In practice, many of the first ‘smart’ initiatives remain essentially focused on the introduction of new technologies, without considering their huge impact on the lives of the citizens. Disregarding citizens’ needs and perceptions can yet potentially endanger the perennially of the global Smart City model, since people can decide to accept or reject some key ‘smart’ concepts or devices and have behavioral influence on their failure/success rate. In this research project, we therefore assume that the sustainability of our future cities is strongly related to end-users’ acceptability towards the introduction of new technologies into their daily-life urban environments.

The research project aims at developing methodologies and tools for sampling, data collection and processing that will (1) help better frame the needs of citizens in terms of well-being in urban environments; (2) enable citizen empowerment through revisited participatory and co-creative frameworks.