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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled City attachment and use of urban services: Benefits for smart cities from 2016 by Daniel Belanche, Luis V. Casaló, and Carlos Orús, published in the Cities journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how the increasing uses of urban services enhance urban management efficiency and also favour social, environmental and economic sustainability. This article analyses how users’ city attachment levels and other personal determinants contribute to their uses of urban services, and suggest implications for managing citizen-oriented urban services to achieve higher living standards.

Cities worldwide compete to attract resources and increase their citizens’ quality of life. Cities try to personalise and improve the efficiency of their local services for more citizen oriented urban management, with providing citizens with choice and detailed urban information and facilitating citizen-infrastructure interactions, among other strategies. These developments aim to meet citizens’ current needs and demands and seeking an actual and fluent interrelation among citizens, local services and infrastructure. Critical mass of regular users in these initiatives can guarantee the efficiency and sustainability of local services in the medium term, but these initiatives can often fail without the inhabitants’ frequent use.

Developments to increase the public services, however, meet with several difficulties. Public services can be seen as time consuming, inconvenient or unsafe by the citizens, such as public transport. Lower density tend to result in lower accessibility of urban services. Built in infrastructure may not be able to keep up with modern enhancements complicating the execution of citizen-oriented plans and increasing implementation costs. Therefore, it is crucial for the sustainability of urban services that the citizens are motivated to used them regularly. Local governments and public managers should seek to establish closer relationship between the citizens and the city for this cause.

Thus, city attachment represents a critical relational variable. City or place attachment refer to an affective bond that people establish with specific physical areas, which generally evokes close relations. This aspect can be approach through sociological or environmental psychological perspective, but even from urban services management. City attachment may also depend upon other factors, such as demographics and provided opportunities across the present urban policies.

The authors tried to understand the optimal ways to increase usage of urban services. For this, they analysed the influence of citizens’ attitudes, city attachment levels and demographic characteristics on usage behaviour, with other impacting factors. Prior research on urban services management mainly focused on performance measures playing little to no attention to citizens’ motivations to use the services. The authors chose Zaragoza, Spain, as the example for their research, which has implemented a smart city plan to integrate urban services and developed marketing campaign to improve the city’s image.

Classical studies of city management show that the citizens’ greater use of urban services have great benefits for local governments, especially in economic terms. Additionally, prior literature also has established that efficiency of urban services delivery improves when local governments have better knowledge of citizens’ preferences and needs. In turn, citizens’ increased uses of urban services also relate to higher levels of satisfaction and performance, in a clear link to loyalty concepts commonly studied in the private sector. Thus, efficiency in urban services depends on both coordination across local government activities and citizens’ usage levels. And the services are intelligent to the extent they can reach and utilise data about how the citizens use the services. The increased use of urban services also must lead to sustainability in terms of the social, environmental and economic dimensions of urban management, best exemplified in the case of urban public transport: the more the people use it, the less congestion, CO2 emission and accidents occur in a city, just to mention the immediate influences.

So, the frequency with which the citizen uses an urban service is critical for the guaranteeing the sustainability of these services in the medium term, and this should be used more widely as a measurement. The authors chose key, in-demand municipal services: public urban transport, municipal bicycle rental, sports facilities, public car parks, and public libraries, without correlations. They also focused on attitude in the meaning of what each citizen holds toward urban services. Additionally, as place attachment is the affective link that people establish with specific settings where they tend to remain and where they fill comfortable and safe and this emotional bond was empirically proved to vary from people to people, the authors focused their place attachment to the city because cities have become important places or reference for their residents.

Since people’s judgements and behaviours depend on the emotional bonds they establish, the authors suggested five hypotheses:

1. City attachment has a positive influence on attitudes towards urban services.
2. City attachment has a positive influence on the use of urban services.
3. Attitudes toward urban services have a positive influence on the use of these services.
4. City attachment differs depending on citizens’ age, gender and educational level
5. The use of urban services differs depending on citizens’ age, gender and educational level.

The authors expected that citizens with personal need to use urban services and holders of smart cards make greater use of urban services. To test their hypotheses, they conducted surveys and then validated the results.

The results showed that city attachment positively affected attitudes toward urban services, supporting the first hypothesis. But the effect of city attachment on the use of urban services was not significant, disproving the second hypothesis. Attitude toward urban services had a positive influence on the use of these services, confirming the third hypothesis. City attachment was positively affected by age and negatively by educational levels, while the use of services was positively influenced by educational levels. However, the other demographical items must be rejected based on the results. Additionally, the use of urban services was enhanced by two control variables: the personal need to use, and smart card possession. Finally, the results suggested that city attachment indirectly affected the use of urban services through attitude.

Although city attachment does not directly affect the use of urban services, it has a positive and significant indirect effect through attitude. This means that being attached to a city is not enough to prompt a given behaviour, but the emotional bonds positively influence the city related entities’ perceptions which positively affects actual behaviours, such as urban service uses. Moreover, demographics may affect both city attachment and the use of urban services, and especially, educational levels seem to be important. Furthermore, the citizens with a greater personal need to use urban services and smart card holders are more utilising these services. Therefore, the use of urban services could be promoted by behaviour-oriented actions, that facilitate access to different urban services – connected services to each other easing the use of them together.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Urban services’ sustainability depend on the users and the frequency of uses, therefore those services need a critical mass for proper existence.
2. Place or city attachment could be used as a measurable variable for urban management, functions, and process developments
3. City attachment can enhance the use of urban services, even if indirectly, so knowing the attachment levels and demographics of a city can enhance the chances of an urban service’s survival and thrive.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How has COVID-19 changed the city attachment landscape? Are people more or less attached to their places and environments? Do they want to be in those environments more, or want to leave them?
2. How has COVID-19 changed the uses of urban services? For example, public transport seems to be less frequently used, but online urban services, such as the telehealth and online education opportunities seem to be working. Is there a major shift in urban services?
3. What urban service do you think could be better in your area? For example with linking two together, easing the use of it in some way, etc.

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