A public management perspective on smart cities: ‘Urban auditing’ for management, governance and accountability

Abstract

Our exploration of three bodies of literaturepublic management, accounting and urban governanceshows that three views on these new technological practices of 'urban auditing' are present in the literature: a technocratic, a critical and an emergent view. We use these three views to introduce the six papers in this special issue. We conclude with the observation that the public management perspective is important for understanding smart city dynamics: we should not present our insights only in our own community, but should also connect to the interdisciplinary debate on smart cities.

Performance measurement in smart city governance: a case study of an Egyptian city council

“…This finding further contributes and adds to Dillard et al’ s (2004) framework that institutional dynamics between the macro and micro levels of the city have created the use of the overall smart city governance system where the (accounting-based) performance measurement system plays not only a political and economic role but also a social and military role in place. This means that institutionalised performance metrics play a powerful accounting and accountability role(s) in shaping and reshaping political decisions in the city council, beyond the Dillard et al’ s (2004) framework and contributes to previous management accounting studies on the potential relationship between performance measurement and smart city governance (Westerdahl, 2020; Stafford et al , 2020; Grossi et al , 2020; Alsaid and Mutiganda, 2020; Argento et al , 2019; Mizrahi and Minchuk, 2019; Brorström et al , 2018; Brorström, 2018; Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017; Meijer et al , 2017; Lapsley et al , 2010; Hollands, 2008).…”

“…This included a public sector company (MAAD) and a private sector company (AETCO). This was then the birth of the first public-private sector participation in implementing a smart city/governance project (Grossi et al , 2020) in Egypt and the emergence of the so-called “third way” (Giddens, 1998) or “hybridisation” (Baxter and Chua, 2003) in a city-level performance measurement system that acts as a mixture of economic and social political performance metrics.…”

“…The result is the emergence of a new generation of cities with intelligent urban ideology that connects socio-economic and political dimensions in creativity in dealing with the difficulties that arise (Tan and Taeihagh, 2020; Albino et al , 2015). Many scholars have demonstrated this new intelligent philosophy in their urban concepts of a “smart city” (Westerdahl, 2020; Grossi et al , 2020; Stafford et al , 2020; Argento et al , 2019; Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017; Meijer and Bolivar, 2016; Albino et al , 2015). The concept of a smart city, they argue, is no more restricted to the deployment of information and communication technologies but combines the city's networked infrastructure.…”

“…Last but not least, another set of previous studies have examined this trendy topic from the perspective of the alleged relationship between smart cities, neoliberalism and socio-political urban developments (Tan and Taeihagh, 2020; Raucci and Tarquinio, 2020; Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017; Meijer et al , 2017; Hollands, 2008). However, despite these valuable efforts and attempts to provide different theoretical and empirical perspectives on the potential relationship between performance measurement and smart city governance, these research endeavours have indicated that smart city governance requires complex decisions to be made with attention to economic, social and environmental performance (Tan and Taeihagh, 2020; Raucci and Tarquinio, 2020; Grossi et al , 2020), but with not enough attention to also “political intervention” (Steccolini et al , 2020; Meijer et al , 2017), “military engagement” (Alawattage and Alsaid, 2018; Noguchi et al , 2015) and “public-private collaboration” (Mutiganda et al , 2020; Alsaid and Mutiganda, 2020) in place. Although these angles have been widely theorised in public sector management accounting research, especially in neoliberalism and its various forms of privatisation, modernisation and state budget reforms (see, e.g.…”

Technocratic Populism and Subnational Governance

“…First, there is the long-standing push towards managerial and technocratic approaches to administrative governance, which has recently received additional tailwind from debates about big data, evidence-based policymaking and experimental policy design (James et al 2017). At the local level, ‘smart city’ strategies, which employ information and communications technology (ICT) to open up new opportunities for addressing problems of urban governance, have spread across the globe (Grossi et al 2020). The value proposition of these approaches is that data-driven, ICT-based public sector innovations and governance approaches can be effective means to counterbalance the shortcomings of electoral politics, especially its short-termism and clientelism, as well as those of a traditional rule-based bureaucracy (Shim and Eom 2008).…”