Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic in governing smart cities

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced important challenges into public management models in all levels of public administrations, with special focus on the local government level due to both the impact of pandemics in the local space and the impact of public policies on the quality of life of the citizenry. The experience in facing this COVID-19 pandemic show the existence of conflicting interests not only regarding the inconsistency of the information disclosure, but also in the public policies taken to tackle the pandemic, which has produced ineffective measures against this epidemiological context. The emergence of new technologies has the potential to redesign more robust governance models using Open Government mechanisms to be more effective in the fight again health pandemic and disaster management, achieving more resilient cities. Putting the focus on this issue, this paper debates about the lessons learned from the management of the COVID-19 pandemic and raises some research questions to be solved by future research. Concretely, this paper advocates the need for the introduction of new aligned and collaborative governance models implementing emerging technologies embedded in Open Government projects as efficient mechanisms to achieve more collaborative and resilient smart cities.