On the Way to Smarter Cities: What Goals and Values Swiss Municipalities Prioritize

An Empirical Analysis of the Perceived Usefulness of Digital Governance Tools among Heterogeneous Swiss Municipalities

“…The paper conducts a literature review to answer the former question and analyzes the steps followed by prominent smart-city applications such as those from the city of Amsterdam, London, and Vienna. The conducted literature review revealed that the definition of the problem, vision and mission, goals and objectives, and strategy together with strategy implementation and strategy monitoring are the most frequently used steps, which are similar to the ones mentioned in Wäspi et al (2022) and Wüst et al (2022). For the second question, a new web-based digital smart-city tool is presented that enables public and private stakeholders to cooperate and co-design strategies.…”

“…Although there is not yet a complete consensus in the literature on the set of such dimensions, many studies agree on the ones illustrated in Figure 1 (Giffinger & Gudrun, 2010). Each dimension consists of multiple action fields 1 , which we discussed in detail in previous work (Wäspi et al, 2022). Municipalities can assess the current state in the different action fields and define targets for improvement.…”

“…Results from the same survey, discussing the guiding goals and values of Swiss municipalities as well as their role in the strategy formation & monitoring, have been previously published in Wäspi et al (2022). Here, the main focus is the perceived usefulness of new digital tools and the reasons for their potential rejection.…”

“…The smart-city concept has been introduced with the assumption that the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) can help to iron out the acute problems that cities are currently facing and mitigate the adverse effects of challenges, such as urbanization and climate change, on citizens' quality of life (Dameri, 2013). Many municipalities around the world strive to implement the concept to be more sustainable, efficient, livable, and equitable (Angelidou, 2015;Wäspi et al, 2022). Although smart cities are often associated only with the use of technology and described from a technical point of view, the concept is broader and compromises environmental, economic, legal, and social aspects.…”

“…They have the potential to boost overall smart-city goals because they enable municipalities to develop, implement, and monitor smart strategies. These tools can serve as a digital infrastructure capable of supporting different parts of the strategy process from strategy formation to implementation and monitoring, including tasks such as project management, project portfolio management, and data collection (Wäspi et al, 2022). Previous research among Swiss municipalities revealed that many of these tasks are often still paper-based or rely on scattered excel sheets, which makes them error-prone and inefficient (Wüst et al, 2022).…”