Smart Technologies for Smart Governments

The availability of ubiquitous ICT infrastructures in smart cities stimulates the development of new services and applications, and creates environments more efficient in collaborative problem-solving and innovation. This chapter looks at the use of new technologies by city governments in smart cities with the aim at improving e-services and at facilitating the participation of citizenry in the process of making decisions in the public arena. To achieve this aim, we have revised the ICTs that smart cities included in the EUROCITIES network are using to deliver public services and to promote e-participation in the city management. Findings indicate the need of improving in active participation into these cities with the aim at creating public value. Else, city governments could be only reproducing old mechanisms in new technological environments.

This chapter develops a research agenda for big and open data in smart cities based on a thorough literature discussion of Actor Network Theory and the key concepts of urban governance and complexity. We argue that much of the smart city data discourse is highly modernist and restores an ideal of control and central steering that is thoroughly at odds with the complex multi-actor environment of smart cities. Against this background, we propose new research directions for the policy aspects of smart cities, asking in particular about the possible contradictory interests of city governments and the ICT sector on the one hand, and of city governments and hyperinformed citizens on the other; the data and analytic aspects of smart cities, raising the question of the quality and implicit values in big data, as well as the analytic challenges to collect, analyze and apply them, including the issue of data literacy for the citizenry of the smart city; the legal and social aspects of smart cities, which concern particularly issues of data ownership and privacy, and the new inequalities that may emerge as a result of smart city and big data developments; and the spatial aspects of smart cities, in particular the material and spatial repercussions of the movement to online, digital public and private services, and the reworking of spatial boundaries.

Connecting data that government releases in diverse domains, such as economy, statistics, environment, transportation, and medicine, as open data available on the web by using semantic web technologies, leads to linked open government data (LOGD). LOGD supports development of innovative, intelligent applications that improve openness and transparency and deliver a smart environment for smart living. With LOGD, any stakeholder can browse a data source and subsequently navigate to related data sources. In this paper, we present an overview of applied Semantic Web technologies in the open government data domain that increase openness and transparency of government, provide for effective data use and deliver smart services to everyone needing information. We will explain how Semantic Web technologies can contribute to a smart collaborative environment that promotes government data use and helps citizens obtain information they need.

Transparency is seen as one important property of open government. The growing importance of government transparency is shown through legislation being passed by most democratic countries during the last few decades. Transparency is based on legislation, regulations and other policy documents. Information and communication technology can help improving the transparency of political decision-making. In smart cities, technology can support transparency in a number of ways, ranging from making documents available online to transparency in the decision-making process. The purpose of this chapter is to provide government officials and other interested parties with an overview of the technologies that are available for transparency in smart cities, and to present lessons learned from cases the authors have been involved in. These lessons can be valuable for decision-makers working towards smart city developments.

Recently, there is a growing attention on the topic of “smart technologies”. Many scholars and specialized journals pay attention to the development of smart tools and to their characteristics of “smartness”. Despite scholars talk of smart technology in many fields from e-government to health-care, there is a very scarce focus on technologies developed in order to digitalize justice procedures (e-justice). This chapter focuses on the topic of e-justice through the lenses of the smart technology literature in order to understand which are the main elements of smartness in the e-justice context and how a service can support them. In order to pursue this objective, the study first analysed the smart technology literature in order to acknowledge which are the main features of a smart technology. This allowed to design a “smart technology framework” that has been applied to the analysis of two e-justice services developed in Europe, the European e-Justice Portal and e-CODEX. By checking which features of smartness the two services are endowed with, we shed light on the peculiarities of e-justice and on which are the main issues that may impede these systems from being smart. In particular, the study acknowledges that when digitalizing justice procedures often the technology reproduces the same issues affecting the legal procedure itself. Even if both cases analyzed demonstrate to be “smart” in terms of multidimensionality, interoperability, adaptability and effectiveness, they are affected by issues related to diffusion and equal accessibility mainly due to the legal procedure that the two services digitalize.

Studies have shown the potential of co-producing public services with the stakeholders for more efficient and sustainable smart city services. However, evidence-based records of the success of such initiatives are limited and there is a strong deficit of analysis of what makes co-production efficient. This study addresses these limitations by exploring the methods, tools and techniques for managing the process effectively, and the skills required to do so, drawing on both literature and empirical data. A case study method and survey is employed to uncover specific factors and challenges operating among public service project managers in European smart cities—based on experience gained from Peripheria, a multidisciplinary project focused on the co-production of Future Internet-enabled services. Six pilot cases are explored to understand how each of them set about engaging their stakeholders in service co-production in order to reach the desired services and impacts for their smart city. A clear pattern emerged from the results of the comparative analysis, showing that, for the most part, there is no one-size-fits-all that can be applied to the cities’ attempts to engage their stakeholders in efficient service co-production. The evidence collected also suggests that public service managers need not only the tools and techniques to encourage collaboration between the multiplicity of stakeholders involved in co-production but also the skills and capacity for managing the governance of co-production. It is these twin messages about no ‘one-size-fits-all’ and the importance of context-specific governance issues about who takes part in decision-making—that need to be carried forward from this study.

This work is concerned with the question of incentives for promoting the implementation of smart technologies in cities from the point of view of organizational matters. This question is tackled in the context of the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (RECI) from the point of view of coordination mechanisms. The paper seeks to analyse the extent to which RECI network has led to successful governance of smart cities in Spain. Case selection is based on an interest to understand changes in public policy management at the local level in contemporary Spain, and it is also motivated by the fact that city governance networks also exist in other geographical areas, thus there is a challenge to understand the features, impact and success of these networks on a global scale.

This paper investigates funding organizations in the context of smart cities and innovative development. Definitions of innovation systems and intermediating organizations emphasize local connectivity, spatial networks and the competed innovative development. The data is collected from funding organizations providing resources for entrepreneurship and research. According to the data, the importance of local, national and international networks and co-operation was underlined. The “knowledge society” has an important task in providing facilities, opportunities and creative environments. Cities have a salient role in providing functioning environments for researchers and entrepreneurs. The results indicate the differentiated views that the funding organizations have concerning the conceptualization and understanding of national and regional innovation systems. The paper concludes by addressing the future research demands.