Abstract
With more than 84% of the population residing in cities, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is among the highly urbanized countries in the world. New strategic policies support the development of smart cities across the kingdom. Though non-availability of data is a major hurdle in the way of planning smart cities. We used a mixed method approach for this study including a qualitative review of various urban planning applications in Jeddah and worldwide in combination with a pilot survey to understand what type and mode of data reporting people prefer. Based on the initial findings a data crowdsourcing application-'SMART JEDDH' was developed and tested. Around 177 crowdsourced reports detecting 15 hotspots of car parking dearth, while 47 PM2.5 measurements at King Abdulaziz University campus was recorded. Results were visualized by heat maps in an open-source GIS environment. Furthermore, we model developed ordinal logistic regression (OLR) models with the 1581 responses on 5-point Likert scale to answer 3 key questions including importance of smartphone-based participation in resolving location specific urban challenges, importance of public participation through smartphones in the improvement of the quality of smart city plans, and the importance of the role of the authorities in mobilising people for smartphone-based participation. OLR results revealed that there is a significant difference of public opinions based on their nationality, gender, education, profession, and income levels in the city of Jeddah. Finally, we recommend that crowdsourced smartphone applications should be promoted for data collection because of inherent benefits through increased public participation. Abundant data though public participation might be helpful in realizing success of smart cities under Vision 2030 of Saudi Arabia of which maximizing 'quality of life' is a key target.