Abstract
A pragmatic and polity-focused solution for governing a smart city in the direction of sustainability is still missing in theory and practice. A debate about whether a smart city is a pragmatic solution for modern challenges or just a technology-led urban utopia is entangled with the vexed issue of governance. While ‘smart governance’ has drawn unprecedented interest, the combination of its conceptual vagueness and broad applications couple with a lack of focus on its underlying international and local political paradigms have raised concerns about its utility. This study contributes to restoring attention to the original concept of governance, its differences with governing and government, and the potential challenges resulting from its functionality in its real, multi-layered, and complex contexts. This paper explores the intellectual connection between governance and smart cities, from both an empirical and a conceptual/analytical perspective. From the empirical side, we examine which actors, processes, and relational mechanisms at different levels that have had an impact on the initiation of smart cities in three Norwegian cities: Trondheim, Bergen, and Bodø. We illustrate how the structural sources of the interests, roles, and power in smart city initiatives have caused governance to emerge and change, but have also affected the goals designed by specific actors.
Highlights
The current rates of growth and resource consumption in cities are fundamentally unsustainable
The methodological approach of this study aims at making sense of the many components that contribute towards the overall functionality of the governance system in smart city initiatives
When it comes to enhancing the legitimacy of the regulatory standards issued by the European Union (EU), political decision makers increasingly turn to network-based forms of governance, building on the horizontal interactions between public and private policy actors
Summary
The current rates of growth and resource consumption in cities are fundamentally unsustainable. Many other studies claim that the practical meaning of a smart city should necessarily emerge out of an interactive process of social dialogue and reflection, which demands that systems of governance guide and steer these collective discussions towards a satisfactory level of consensus [2,3,4,23,24,25]. They argue that the governance of sustainable smart cities should be interactive, implying that its practical bearing cannot be established independent of the needs, interests, values, and aspirations of its citizens [14]. As Meijer and Bolívar [3] (p.3) argue, “solving societal problems is not merely a question of developing good policies but much more a managerial question of organizing strong collaboration between government and other stakeholders”, including citizens
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