Smart Cities as Large Technological Systems: Collective Action Problems as Organizational Barriers to Urban Digital Transformation

Abstract

In a race to develop ‘smart cities’, policymakers in metropolitan regions across the world are rapidly deploying IoT devices, sensors, and emerging ICTs, including AI and facial recognition to solve various urban governance challenges, including the need to increase efficiencies, and empower citizens. While much attention has been paid to the technological obstacles of deploying advanced IoT infrastructures and devices, in this paper we argue that policymakers must also confront significant organizational barriers in the deployment of IoT due to collective action problems. Disparate authorities and conflicting goals and values among stakeholders, e.g. city executives, for-profit companies, and local constituents, create challenging coordination and resource allocation problems for municipalities to effectively deploy and govern smart ICTs. To analyze these deployment and governance challenges, we draw on research from science and technology studies (Hughes, 1969) to frame smart cities as large technological systems, consisting not just of technologies but organizational and institutional processes as well as economic theories (Gavrilets & Fortunato, 2014; Hardin, 1968; Ostrom, 2010) to conceptualize the collective action problems of IoT governance in municipalities. The paper draws on a sample of qualitative, in-depth interviews with senior city executives (administrative and political levels) of North American smart cities, including Boston, MA; Columbus, OH; Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles, CA; New Orleans, LA; Pittsburgh, PA; Syracuse, NY; and Toronto, ON. A document analysis of strategic and technical documents complements the data set. Using this combined data set, the paper deploys a large technological systems perspective to identify overarching themes affecting the use of ICTs in smart cities. We find that issues related to disparate – and at times competing – stakeholder motives and goals play a strong role in inhibiting the deployment of smart city technologies. Preliminary findings, suggest that challenges in smart cities are also organizational, associated with acting collectively, rather than solely technological, associated with utilizing the ‘right’ technologies. This is in particular the case with regard to preserving privacy and security as well as mitigating risk from city-wide IoT deployments (e.g., smart transportation). We further find that due to the networked property of smart cities, addressing cybersecurity risk requires identifying effective collective arrangements with the stakeholders responsible for managing risk. As even advanced and mature smart city initiatives have increasingly faced these challenges, including significant overhauls of such efforts (e.g., Kansas City, MO), the paper will conclude by offering important and timely recommendations for how policymakers may overcome these collective action challenges caused by negative externalities, risks of failure and disaster, and management, control and coordination problems – and as such inform future ICT implementation and governance strategies for smart cities.