Digital Cities Web Marketing Strategies in Italy: The Path Towards Citizen Empowerment

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of ‘digital city’ has been introduced as a strategic way of designing a city by highlighting, in particular, the importance of Information and Communication Technologies. Nowadays the performance of our cities depends only in small part on its infrastructure, as an increasing importance is given to the availability, quality and delivery of public services. In this context, citizens have new expectations based on involvement, collaboration and participation. The aim in managing a city becomes making citizens actors in the decision making process creating engagement and involvement, providing ways of direct relationships with politicians and civil servants.This paper attempts on the one hand to assess the web strategies of Italian municipalities to see their level of “citizen empowerment” by adopting a revised version of the Citizens Web Empowerment Index (CWEI) designed to benchmark administrations’ official web portals – and on the other hand, to present some best practices: initiatives which, according to the CWEI, allow the creation of empowerment by answering at citizens’ needs.The analysis was made on the web portals of the 104 Italian cities with over 60,000 inhabitants in 2012 and 2013. Results show a low level of the indicator which testifies that the path towards citizen empowerment is still long. Despite this, the good examples spread around the country allow to believe in a close future where marketing strategies will be more and more oriented towards empowerment creation.KeywordsCitizensCWEIEmpowermentItalyParticipationPublic administrationsSmartcitiesWeb 2.0Web portals