Factors Affecting Citizens’ Security Perception of Smart City Construction: From the Perspective of Participatory Governance

Citizen-centric smart city construction (SCC) has been the crucial mode for enhancing citizens’ well-being with rapid urbanization. While smart cities are constructed to improve urban operational safety, the concomitant low resilience of infrastructure, data breaches, and other issues also lead to physical, financial, and legal consequences, which therefore have the complicated the impact on citizens’ security perception of smart city construction (CSPSCC). To achieve sustainable smart city construction, it is important to clarify the influencing factors on CSPSCC. Although the enhancement of CSPSCC needs the joint efforts of citizens, government, and social organizations, the previous studies mostly focus on influencing factors from the single stakeholder. To address this gap, the theory of planned behavior was expanded to examine factors influencing CSPSCC from the perspective of participatory governance. Taking Nanjing as a case, hypotheses testing, mediating testing, and heterogeneity analysis were carried out for this theoretical model. The results show that the security governance of citizens, the government, and social organizations all had a positive impact on CSPSCC, with citizens’ behavioral intention being the most significant influencing factor. In addition, CSPSCC is also significantly affected by the citizens’ age, educational level, and usage frequency of smart city services.