Citizen Participation through Digital Platforms: the Challenging Question of Data Processing for Cities.

This paper focuses on digital platforms supporting citizen participation in the era of Smart Cities. Our study presents and analyses two examples of online participation platforms, implemented by two Walloon cities: Mons and Liège (Belgium). These two cases highlight the differences and the similarities between both cities’ interpretation of digital participation, as well as the difficulties they faced, especially considering the data processing by city officials. In light of the challenges observed through those two cases, we suggest that digital platforms might potentially be misused, and somehow bias the whole digital participatory process. We therefore issue recommendations about how to design, launch and manage such platforms and, moreover, suggest that platforms should be supplemented by other digital or traditional participatory processes in order to reach higher levels of participation.