Smart Urban Governance: Governing Cities in the “Smart” Era

Abstract

According to many scholars, building a smart city requires “smart” governance approaches, including new government structures, new relationships, and new processes. Here, smart governance can be generally understood as the capacity to apply digital technologies and intelligent activities in the processing of information and in decision-making and creating innovative institutional arrangements. It requires reshaping the role of governments, citizens, and other social actors, innovating organizational and decision-making processes, and improving the use of existing and emerging information technologies to conceptualize and frame a new generation of e-participation. In practice, however, neither the development nor the advancement of smart governance is satisfactory. The implementation of smart governance in practice is mainly characterized by a corporate-led, technocratic way of governing cities. This raises the question how a transformative smart governance of cities can be conceptualized and developed and what role ICT should play in the transformative smart governance of cities. More recent studies show that the long experience of planning support ICT studies in handling technological innovations is able to offer potential insights into the innovative development and application of new ICTs in the field of the smart city and its subfield of smart governance. The key statement is that planning support systems (PSS) innovations and applications in urban planning should be closely related to the needs of users and planning practices. Then, authors from urban studies claim that there is a need to link smart city governance to the “urban issue,” since knowledge cannot be simply gained through data-mining and ICT-based urban analytics. Then, the urban issue is produced by urban social processes which indicates a set of social relationships. For urban governance to become smart, the development of functionalities, applications, and ICTs in augmenting urban governance should be closely linked to urban issues (e.g., political, social, cultural, historical, and spatial issues) and support a smart urban governance in the service of local communities and ordinary people, rather than a small group of highly skilled experts. To respond to this, I argue that the mentioned perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at smart urban governance. Thus, this dissertation specifically focuses on how smart urban governance approach can be conceptualized and what role ICT could play in such governance. The conceptualization of smart urban governance responds to arguments that alternatives to corporate-led, technocratic smart governance should have “a solid epistemological and ontological understanding of the urban … and be more aware of how urban problems and their proposed smart solution are socially constructed” (Verrest and Pfeffer, 2019). It explores the role of the situated agents and their contribution to promoting a demand-driven smart governance. It also highlights a sociotechnical approach to ICT development and implementation. In other words, it is necessary to understand why smart technologies are designed, developed, and implemented as an appropriate answer to the perceived and constructed problems. Finally, smart urban governance highlights the importance of contextual factors for finding solutions to urban challenges.