The robot in city hall: the limitations, structure, and governance of smart city technology regimes

Abstract

This dissertation examines smart city governance. Billions of dollars have been invested into urban technologies as a means of providing solutions to urban problems such as concentrated poverty, housing shortages, or digital divides. Smart cities are easy to critique, such as the conjecture that smart cities represent capture of public institutions by private forces. However, little attention is given to the limitations on city power, legal structure and intercity competition, and how those limitations have contributed to the smart city as a model for urban governance. Without understanding how the smart city emerged as a governance model, it is difficult to understand how cities can better apply power to problems. To address the question of governance, this dissertation's three components represent macro, meso, and micro views of smart cities. The three articles explain why cities' powers are limited and how these limitations shape urban governance, the form of governance embodied in the smart city, and the effects smart city policies can have on the lives of urban dwellers. In the first article, "Beyond High-Tech Growth Machines: How Institutions and Politics Inform Smart City Adoption in the United States," I examine the limitations on city power and the urban theory that has come from these limitations. Using a quantitative analysis of American cities, I argue against the growth machine theory of urban politics. My findings indicate that smart city policies are more determined by political and institutional factors, and that smart city policies overlap with one, but not all factors, as police surveillance technologies. The second article, "Smart City Governance: The Use of Technology, Data, and Expertise in the Urban Regime," explores how cities conceptualize smart cities and situates the smart city within urban regime theory. I argue that the smart city constitutes what I call the urban technology regime, a form of governance created by a coalition of government, universities, and the private sector. Central to the urban technology regime are data and expertise, resources that regime actors bring to the coalition. Findings show that the public sector acts as a central organizer and coordinates intergovernmental and interactor cooperation, the private sector provides local economic opportunity and the technology that makes up the infrastructural backbone of the smart city, and universities provide expertise and localized knowledge that makes the smart city work. The third article, "'We Have No New Information': Strategic Expressed Uncertainty as Rumor Correction in Public Emergency Warnings," investigates the possibilities of using the urban dashboard as a means of correcting rumors during a crisis. A crucial component of rumor correction is the provision of a factual alternative, but what can communicators do when there is no factual alternative available? I argue that expressing uncertainty and using public-facing dashboards can be effective communication strategies for municipalities during a hazardous emergency in lieu of a factual alternative. Using an original experiment, I find that expressed uncertainty is successful at both increasing trust in government and decreasing trust in rumors, and that in some situations, exposure to a dashboard image is effective at lowering trust in rumors. Combined, these three articles present a more complex picture of the smart city. They identify that the smart city is the result of actors in a governing coalition, including the government, universities, and the private sector. When cities are limited by legal structures and intercity competition, they will turn to other possibilities, including the smart city, to address pressing urban issues.--Author's abstract