Smart City Governance Research Articles

The conundrum in smart city governance: Interoperability and compatibility in an ever-growing ecosystem of digital twins

Abstract Today, technological developments are ever-growing yet fragmented. Alongside inconsistent digital approaches and attitudes across city administrations, such developments have made it difficult to reap the benefits of city digital twins. Bringing together experiences from five research projects, this paper discusses these digital twins based on two digital integration methodologies—systems and semantic integration. We revisit the nature of the underlying technologies, and their implications for interoperability and compatibility in the context of planning processes and smart urbanism. Semantic approaches present a new opportunity for bidirectional data flows that can inform both governance processes and technological systems to co-create, cross-pollinate, and support optimal outcomes. Building on this opportunity, we suggest that considering the technological dimension as a new addition to the trifecta of economic, environmental, and social sustainability goals that guide planning processes, can aid governments to address this conundrum of fragmentation, interoperability, and compatibility.

Optimizing the Role of ICT and Citizen Participation: Analysis of Smart City Governance Implementation in Jakarta, Indonesia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The implementation of Smart City Governance (SCG) in Southeast Asia has gained attention as a way to improve urban life by integrating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and citizen participation. This study examines the implementation of SCG in two Southeast Asian cities, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through online news articles analysis and data Twitter. The study employs a qualitative research method using NVivo 12 Plus software for data analysis. The study finds that the use of ICT in smart city governance in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur has increased citizen participation through social media and government apps, especially Twitter. Analysis of Twitter data highlights the importance of monitoring public sentiment and differences in views related to the implementation of smart city governance. Citizen participation has a significant impact in improving transparency and the quality of public services. Digital inclusion is key in ensuring inclusive citizen participation and overcoming gaps in access. The study recommends that Jakarta can learn from Kuala Lumpur's success and enhance its communication strategies to increase public awareness and participation while also improving the quality and accessibility of ICT services to facilitate citizen engagement. This research provides insights for policymakers and practitioners in the development of SCG in Southeast Asia.

Exploring Adverse Effects from Technological Change in the Context of Smart City Governance

Exploring Adverse Effects from Technological Change in the Context of Smart City Governance

The Role of Internet of Things in Smart City Environmental Monitoring: A Pollution Detection System

Smart cities represent a transformative vision of urban living, where technology seamlessly integrates with the urban landscape to enhance sustainability and quality of life. Central to this vision is the effective management of environmental factors, particularly air quality and temperature. This paper presents a comprehensive study on real-time environmental pollution detection within smart cities, utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. We explore the intricate relationships between air pollutant indicators (o3_AQI, no2_AQI, co_AQI, and pm25_AQI) and temperature, shedding light on the dynamic interactions that underlie urban atmospheric conditions. Our research employs a robust dataset and employs statistical analysis, including Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, to uncover significant correlations between key environmental variables. These insights not only contribute to a deeper understanding of urban pollution dynamics but also enable the development of predictive models for temperature fluctuations based on pollutant levels. Such models hold promise for proactive environmental management and public health interventions. Furthermore, our study highlights the pivotal role of IoT sensors in revolutionizing smart city governance, offering real-time data-driven solutions for sustainable urban living. As cities worldwide strive to enhance their environmental resilience, this research provides valuable insights and tools for harnessing the potential of IoT technologies in the pursuit of cleaner and more livable urban environments.

Juridical Analysis of Smart Society: Society and Governance Era 5.0

The era of society 5.0 or super smart society is urgently needed adjustments, especially for the benefit of society and the preparation of various leading sectors. The future determines unprecedented programs and plans. The analysis used by the research team in writing this scientific paper emphasizes the normative approach method where in strengthening the renewal and refinement of results supported by a qualitative approach and the Grounded theory model. The results of this study show that the Era of Society 5.0 reduces the relationship between humans and technology. And novelty for this research, technology becomes an essential philosophical aspect in supporting needs that must be met by everyone. The perspective of materialism and existentialism views it as a critical period because society is prone to division if not directed properly. The development of society 5.0 in Indonesia was initiated by a pilot project of smart city governance in several major cities and developed through technological aspects and building the character of human resources in smart society 5.0 entities. This perspective analyse also to be conduct and compared with some city has implemented smart city to developed smart society.

MaaS Implementation in Bandung City: Big Data Collection, Integration, and Utilization

The results of the Eden Strategy Institute 2021 study show that Bandung City is ranked 28th in the world's Top 50 Smart City Government Rankings. However, from the results of the Asian Development Outlook 2019 study, Bandung City is ranked as the most congested city in Indonesia and 14th in Asia. Solutions to problems are offered in the form of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), an integrated system of transportation services, digitization, and the use of big data. The realization of MaaS requires contributions from all parties. The synergy between the government, academia, stakeholders, the media, and the public is called Pentahelix. The research stage includes the collection of primary data and secondary data by conducting a literature review. Then conduct a graphical analysis of multivariate data on Pentahelix with three assessments, namely performance, competence, and involvement. Next, modeling and loading were carried out for a pilot simulation of The Bandung City area in the eastern region using macro or meso-level traffic simulation software, namely PTV Visum 2022 (Student). After comparing with real-time analysis from the Google Maps application, comprehensive results were obtained with real conditions. As a means of controlling public transportation services, an Electronic Device Capture (EDC) hardware digital system is needed that is integrated between modes through software and artificial intelligence. The final stage of this study was carried out a risk analysis matrix for the implementation of MaaS for the city of Bandung with moderate risk results. MaaS is not a new idea, but it is a good solution to overcome congestion and change Bandung’s transportation concept.

Authoritarian Smart City: A Research Agenda

Despite the prevalence of smart city discourse across many disciplines, governance systems, and policy-making bodies, its conceptual foundations are based either on semi-/democratic political constellations or deemed apolitical. This research agenda highlights the embeddedness of any smart city agenda within a more extensive political regime. Furthermore, the research agenda focuses on the authoritarian socio-technical imaginaries and their role in shaping smart city policies, implementation, and governance. The research agenda also highlights the research on authoritarian surveillance and its interconnection with authoritarian smart city conceptualisation. Furthermore, it offers three research areas for authoritarian surveillance: authoritarian practices in democratic contexts, the use of surveillance technologies for maintaining autocratic power, and authoritarian structure and governance of platform corporations. Finally, similar to critical voices in critical data studies and the field of information and communication technology for development, the research agenda aims to demystify the prevalent assumption of the good smart city that fixes all injustices that socio-political endeavours have not achieved. It argues that every technologically enabled tool or platform reflects the political constellations in which it is embedded and affects and produces new socio-technical interlinkages that could never be apolitical.

A systematic framework for the complex system engineering of city data governance

The importance of data governance in the information age has become a deep consensus among all sectors. Under this context, data-driven urban governance has also become a key requirement for city development. However, as smart city and digital government continuously make progress, the utilization of urban data is still far from true intelligence, and no theoretical research on city data governance can fully guide the concrete implementation of engineering practice. In view of this, this paper proposes a systematic framework for the complex system engineering of urban data governance. We deconstruct urban data governance into a series of basic elements and discuss the key problems in urban data governance engineering regarding three dimensions, i.e., data quality, value and security. In view of the complexity of engineering projects, we establish the systematic framework of urban data governance from four levels, i.e., cognitive, methodological, technical and practical, and demonstrated the application in real practice with a case study on data-based epidemic prevention and control project in Shenzhen. The framework is proposed aiming to break through the key common difficulties in the practice of urban data governance engineering, provide systematic and operable solutions, and finally achieve the set goals.

How Are Medium-Sized Cities Implementing Their Smart City Governance? Experiences from the Emilia-Romagna Region

Within the smart city debate, this paper aims to reflect on whether and how medium-sized Italian cities are organizing their smart transition technically as well as administratively. The smart city concept was developed in the 1990s when major European cities began a smart transition through widespread urban regeneration projects and the introduction of advanced technologies applied not only to the physical city but also to governance, policymaking, and communication, involving multiple sectors of city administrations. In the last decade, medium-sized cities have also started this transition process, although with lower emphasis than metropolitan cities. In most medium-sized Italian cities, this transition, in accordance with national and regional guidelines, has sometimes led to competencies reorganization within local governments. Within this framework, the paper examines the tools with which medium-sized Italian cities’ administrations address the smart transformation in their territories, comparing a sample of 10 cities in Emilia-Romagna and considering policymaking, governance structure, past and current projects, and communication transparency. The expected result is therefore a systematic review of experiences to reconstruct a complex picture of the political and administrative choices that have led to the implementation or setting in motion of smart transformation processes to draw some useful lessons.

Combining Green Metrics and Digital Twins for Sustainability Planning and Governance of Smart Buildings and Cities

Creating a more sustainable world will require a coordinated effort to address the rise of social, economic, and environmental concerns resulting from the continuous growth of cities. Supporting planners with tools to address them is pivotal, and sustainability is one of the main objectives. Modeling and simulation augmenting digital twins can play an important role to implement these tools. Although various green best practices have been utilized over time and there are related attempts at measuring green success, works in the published literature tend to focus on addressing a single problem (e.g., energy efficiency), and a comprehensive approach that takes the multiple facets of sustainable urban planning into consideration has not yet been identified. This paper begins with a review of recent research efforts in green metrics and digital twins. This leads to developing an approach that evaluates organizational green best practices to derive metrics, which are used for computational decision support by digital twins. Furthermore, it leverages these research results and proposes a metric-driven framework for sustainability planning that understands a city as a sociotechnical complex system. Such a framework allows the practitioner to take advantage of recent developments and provides computational decision support for the complex challenge of sustainability planning at the various levels of urban planning and governance.

Performance Analysis of Smart City Governance: Dynamic Impact of Beijing 12345 Hotline on Urban Public Problems

The 12345 hotline service has become a widely accepted smart city governance system of citizen contact with the local authorities in Beijing and has enabled leaders to handle public complaints more effectively. However, there have been few studies on the performance of the 12345 hotline. This study, taking Beijing city as the study area, explains how this system improved urban problem management and the degree of improvement in different urban problem categories. First, we studied the quantity distribution of 12345 cases and the public’s top concerns. Then, based on the VAR model, we analyzed the specific dynamic influence process and degree of 12345 cases on UGMS cases, which reflect urban public problems. The main findings of this research are as follows: (1) Illegal parking/charging problems and issues with the city’s dirty conditions were the two primary concerns of the public. (2) The 12345 system hampered the increase in urban public problems with a lag of 3–5 days. (3) Exceptionally, for the construction management and market regulation categories, the hotline cases had no active effect on urban problem management. This paper can help city authorities to assess the strength and weakness of the 12345 system and decide on improvement plans for urban management.

Business Model Approach to Smart City Governance

In transitioning from hierarchal corporate governance to platform governance mechanisms, smart cities need to develop new models for managing the dynamics of platform governance between city divisions. By conceptualizing smart cities as a platform of platforms, this paper uses the business model approach to develop a platform governance framework in the smart city context. The contribution of this paper is to illustrate how the business model approach can enhance better communication between different layers of smart cities and thus improve smart city development.

Invite everyone to the table, but not to every course

Innovative collaboration strategies are a promising tool for fostering the governance of smart cities while acknowledging citizen centricity. During implementation, however, determining the number and background of the involved actors is challenging. The Design-Thinking (DT) approach appears suitable for addressing this issue as it offers a concrete and adaptable course of action. The present contribution involves a study on implementing DT principles in a German health resort and identifies three critical components: (1) team, (2) process, and (3) workspace. Our use case is an adaptable project- and workshop plan that encourages the implementation of DT collaboration in smart cities when designing digital services. Our results provide initial guidelines on how to involve diverse actors, when to integrate trained DT coaches, and how to design collaborative innovation in a digital way. The practice-oriented insights gained in the study can be applied, adapted, and discussed in other smart cities and citizen-centered projects.

Bibliometric Analysis of Smart Public Governance Research: Smart City and Smart Government in Comparative Perspective

The concept of smart public governance (SPG) is gaining attention among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around the world, especially in response to the modernisation of public administration through emerging technologies in both local (smart city) and national (smart government) levels. Spurred by the noticeable lack of understanding of the SPG concept, the paper aims to comprehensively examine the SPG research by considering the characteristic differences between the smart city and smart government concepts. Bibliometric analysis is based on the Scopus database, containing 775 documents published in the last two decades and facilitated by several established and innovative bibliometric approaches. The results reveal the growth of SPG research over time. Despite the smart city concept being the dominant focus in the SPG research, the smart government concept has been becoming more relevant in recent years, as indicated by some prominent documents published in reputable journals like Government Information Quarterly. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon countries are chiefly engaged in SPG research. However, New Zealand and South Korea are identified as countries with a stronger focus on the smart government concept. The results show the smart city concept is connected with several smart-related initiatives (e.g., smart transportation, smart living, smart energy, etc.), while the smart government concept is primarily associated with smart (de)regulation and smart grid. The findings may add to the understanding of the future development of SPG research, on both local and national levels.

Does a smart business environment promote corporate investment? a case study of Hangzhou.

As a result of business environment reforms in China's Hangzou, the cost of business has reduced, the confidence of Hangzhou enterprises has survived the COVID-19 outbreak, and foreign investment continues to increase. Nevertheless, Hangzhou's business environment has shortcomings, such as insufficient technology, talent, and intelligent infrastructure. Two unresolved questions persist: (i) Has the smart business environment stimulated corporate investment by reducing system costs and boosting corporate confidence? (ii) How do the commercial climate's shortcomings impact the relationship between the intelligent business environment and business costs/confidence? We examined the impact of a local smart business environment on the corporate investment scale in Hangzhou using factor analysis, cluster analysis, linear regression, and path analyses of data from 297 firm managers. Smart governance improved public administration, financing, and rule of law. The business environment promoted investment by increasing business confidence and decreasing institutional costs. Weak intelligent property protection and legal fairness hindered the positive influence of smart governance on business confidence and system costs. This is the first study combining business environment, smart city, and smart governance concepts to analyze the influence of local smart business environments on business confidence, institutional costs, and investment. Our conclusion on the limitation effect of intelligent business environment on enterprise investment attempts to inspire further research on the intersection of business environments and smart cities. The law of intelligent business environment attracting investment obtained in the context of China, the largest developing country with diversified economic development, is of great significance for other developing countries. Countries can attract investment and promote economic development through intelligent governance. Developing countries should construct smart service platforms, coordinate supervision of public credit, reduce financing constraint, construct a government under the rule of law, improve the quality of land management, and protect intellectual property rights.

Technology Strategy for Meticulous Governance of Smart Cities: Memory Bus Width Aware Pruning for Efficient Image Super-Resolution Implementation in FPGA

The mega-city governance is based on the aggregation, collation, development and application of multi-scene data, and efficient access to scene data is a key link to promote the meticulous governance of smart cities. Super-resolution technique is the process of upscaling and improving the details within an image. In this paper, we implement a 16-layer residual neural network (ResNet) for the efficient image super-resolution in FPGA. We discover that the memory access is the major performance bottleneck of this implementation. To reduce the memory access overhead, we design a pruning algorithm with the consideration of the memory bus width. Since the memory used in our design generates 256 bits for each access, the proposed pruning algorithm drops the kernel by aligning this bit width. That is, all kernels in one layer are ranked by its L1-norm and we drop the kernels out of the 256 bits. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the number of weights by 50% compared with the baseline. As a result, the inference speed can be enhanced by 3 times.

Sense and the city: An Emotion Data Framework for smart city governance

In the smart city agenda, data plays a key role in shaping governance and participation around urban planning, and this data is increasingly derived from sensors of all kinds. These sensors increasingly include physiological and sentiment analysis to gauge the emotional states of urban citizens. In urban planning, emotional data has so far been conceptualised as ‘people as sensors’ where data is used to create an aggregated emotion layer for real-time urban planning. This paper argues this approach does not enable citizens any meaningful participation in urban planning. In contrast, this paper demonstrates what emotion can ‘do’ when citizen actively use emotions to participate in the problem framing in smart city governance. The paper offers a framework of smart city participation with emotion data by focusing on the Bio Mapping project, where physiological sensors are used as participatory mapping approach that led to urban planning. This approach enabled citizens to engage in a dialogue around their emotional response to urban space and articulate the potential for emotion data in urban governance. There needs to be a consideration of 1) multi-dimensional emotion data, 2) an active participant role, 3) extended participation within the planning process 4), and empowerment within urban governance. The paper argues that a participatory approach to emotion data can function as a dynamic leverage point of negotiation in smart city governance between citizens, urban space, and civic agencies.

The role of smart cities to promote smart governance in municipalities

The main focus of this paper is to provide a contextualized reflection about what smart cities are and their primary contribution in promoting smart governance.
 Objectives
 Objectives include amongst others, the definition of the smart city concept and how it can be used as a means to achieve more efficient and sustainable cities. It further elucidates the use of internet enhanced public service delivery to promote smart governance in municipalities.
 Prior Work
 This paper is built upon existing prior work that has been done in the emerging trends in smart cities. Researchers have identified several different “discourses” related to smart cities However, this paper delves deeper into how innovation and the concept of internet of things can enhance public service delivery. It further contextualizes the use of internet enabled public services with the purpose of making municipalities smart cities, with smart governance by offering smart services to its communities.
 Approach
 A qualitative research approach was used to fulfil the objectives of the paper through an in-depth desktop analysis of existing literature from recent journals.
 Results 
 The research findings traverse that although a plethora of challenges remain, it is the amenability of both the political and administrative leadership and the gravity attached to technology that determines the extent of depth of transforming municipalities towards the goal of being smart cities.
 Implications
 The overall goal of this paper is to lay a foundation for the development of a comprehensive framework to redirect administrators and political office bearers towards smart city and smart governance inclined policy directives as suggested in the research findings. Inferences drawn from the paper will assist in further research in the field of innovation, smart cities and smart governance as wheels and machinery of service delivery.
 Value
 Finally, this paper attempts to merge theory and practice to work towards understanding of what a smart city means for South African cities through smart governance manage and minimize challenges confronted by municipalities through the use of technology.

Dynamics in the governance of smart cities: insights from South Korean smart cities

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explain how the governance model changes in smart cities by using South Korea's experience as a case study. South Korean smart city development is divided into three phases according to the national master plan and maturity of smart cities. Phase 1 took place from 2008 to 2013, phase 2 extended from 2014 to 2018, and phase 3 began in 2019 and will last into 2023. The cases under consideration are three representative smart cities: Seoul, Songdo, and Sejong. The analysis traces how the governance model of each city changes throughout the three phases. According to stakeholders’ roles and relationships, the governance model is categorized into four types (corporate, market, multilevel, and network governance). The governance model in all three cities showed little change. In Seoul and Songdo, market governance was dominant, while in Sejong, multilevel governance was. However, in phase 3, the institutional setting is changing to facilitate network governance in all three cities. The government guided the collaboration, giving more opportunities for private, academic, and civil actors to engage.

Smart Governance: A Study of the Jakarta Smart City During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study focused on the problems of smart city governance in Indonesia, especially in the implementation of smart governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Jakarta Smart City. Smart governance can help provide information and influence governance in handling COVID-19. This study examined the development of smart city governance in contributing to the handling of COVID-19, especially in providing smart information to stakeholders to improve the effectiveness of policies. This study also investigated the development of technological, institutional and human capital aspects. Data were collected from websites and smart city media in Jakarta such as Citizen Relations Management, Open data, Qlue applications, Jakarta Kini ( Jaki), and the Jakarta Smart City portal. The results showed the technical aspects that influenced the development of smart city governance, in terms of the basis for digitizing government that led to urban intelligence, as well as the institutional and human capital aspects which were also needed to support the success of the smart city.
 Keywords: smart city governance, Jakarta smart city, COVID-19 pandemic