Abstract
Abstract. In Flanders (Belgium), there is a growing awareness among city administrations and governments to turn their cities into smart cities by transforming their policy decisions into evidence-based and data-driven policymaking. Nonetheless, many Flemish cities still face several challenges related to the integration of data-driven policy evaluation research at different stages of their policy making processes. For that reason, the ‘Smart Retail Dashboard’-project was set up, which aims to develop a dashboard for helping Flemish cities in transforming their retail policies into data-driven policies. This paper reports on the initial findings of this project. The most important finding is the varying degrees of maturity across cities regarding their smart retail policies. This is illustrated by the current state of data-driven policy making in the retail sector in Flanders. Subsequently we provide an overview of the current challenges reported by mature and less mature cities, which range from the cost and the usability of data to the analysis and interpretation of such data. We discuss how a Smart Retail Dashboard could provide answers to these challenges. This discussion helps city administrations to transform their policymaking processes into data-driven processes and dashboard developers to optimise their development processes.
Highlights
The Smart City concept has been popularised for over at least a decade but turning its promises into practice remains a challenge for cities today
One example of the rising popularity of technology in policy processes is the urge for data-driven policymaking, which refers to policy decisions made on the basis of objective empirical and evidence-based evaluation research about the context, need and efficacy of different policy programs rather than subjective intuition (Janssen & Helbig, 2018; Ruppert, Bernard & Kohlhammer, 2013)
The maturity level is defined by 1) the extent internal data7 is currently used in the policy cycle; 2) the extent private data is utilised in the policy cycle and 3) whether civil servants are able to interpret the data
Summary
The Smart City concept has been popularised (and hyped) for over at least a decade but turning its promises into practice remains a challenge for cities today. While data-driven policy making has always been present to more or lesser extent in policy making, the increasing availability of vast amounts and new forms of data introduced by new information and communication technologies, as well as the increasing ability to combine data from different sources and domains, can provide new types of tools and insights to policy makers. This data can be captured from Internet of Things solutions (e.g. sensors in public parking garages), structured information in reporting systems internal to city administrations or detailed data on the public domain (e.g. from satellite imaging)
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