Abstract
This theoretical viewpoint paper presents a new perspective on urban governance in an information age. Smart city governance is not only about technology but also about re-organizing collaboration between a variety of actors. The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in the public domain is rapidly changing the way collaborative action is organized. These technologies reduce the transaction costs for massive collaboration dramatically and thus facilitate new forms of collaboration that we could call ‘open governance’: new innovative forms of collective action aimed at solving complex public policy issues, contributing to public knowledge, or replacing traditional forms of public service provision. These innovative open and collaborative organisational forms in cities seem to point towards not only a wide variety of digitally connected actors but also to a fundamentally different and more invisible role of government in these arrangements. We argue that the recently emerging paradigm of New Public Governance (NPG) (Osborne 2010) also fails to capture the dynamics of open governance since it does not acknowledge the emergent – pop-up – character of the new collaborations; neither does it present an understanding of massive individualized collaboration in cities. This paper aims to theoretically and empirically explore the core elements and the underlying socio-technical developments of this new Open Governance (OG) paradigm and compare and contrast OG with existing governance paradigms. Based on illustrative real-life cases, we will argue that we need a new paradigm that is better capable of explaining these emerging innovative forms of governing cities. We will argue that this requires an understanding of governance as a platform that facilitates an urban ecosystem. By connecting new insights from studies on digital governance to the debate about governance paradigms, this paper results in a set crucial empirical and normative questions about governance of cities and also in guidelines for urban governance that builds upon the rich, emerging interactions in cities that are facilitated by new technologies.
Highlights
The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in smart cities is rapidly changing the way collaborative action is organized
The map was updated in real-time, so that people affected by the earthquake had immediate access to critical information for making decisions on primary needs and were able to help others by providing their latest information on local circumstances. This emergent “ad hoc”organisation consisting of a large variety of individual, organisational, and institutional actors all using open data, a digital platform and web-based digital networks turned out to be critical in order to manage this natural disaster more effectively for all people concerned—an activity that has traditionally been undertaken by an institutionalised public sector organisation, usually part of government and using a command-and-control style approach
This real-life case example illustrates the emergence of what we call open governance: fundamental changes in collaboration in smart cities caused by the widespread use of networked technologies and the collaborative sharing of data are leading to new innovative forms of collective action aimed at solving complex public policy issues, contributing to public knowledge, or replacing traditional forms of public service provision
Summary
The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in smart cities is rapidly changing the way collaborative action is organized. This emergent “ad hoc”organisation consisting of a large variety of individual, organisational, and institutional actors all using open data, a digital platform and web-based digital networks turned out to be critical in order to manage this natural disaster more effectively for all people concerned—an activity that has traditionally been undertaken by an institutionalised public sector organisation, usually part of government and using a command-and-control style approach This real-life case example illustrates the emergence of what we call open governance: fundamental changes in collaboration in smart cities caused by the widespread use of networked technologies and the collaborative sharing of data are leading to new innovative forms of collective action aimed at solving complex public policy issues, contributing to public knowledge, or replacing traditional forms of public service provision. To develop a firm understanding of this new form of governance, we will compare it with existing models of governance
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