Smart Governance in Practice

Abstract

The idea of the smart city, with its promise to address the swiftly accruing societal challenges in cities through the use of technology, has over the past decade increasingly gained in popularity and appeal. Local governments have consequently taken to incorporating smart city approaches into their development strategies (Camboim, Zawislak, & Pufal, 2019;Caragliu & Del Bo, 2019). The smart city theme has also generated interest among academics, resulting in a rapidly growing body of literature accompanied by conferences, organisations, articles, and special issues. The literature presents a cacophony of perspectives on the smart city, among which two major streams stand out: the technology-driven smart city and the human smart city.The first focuses on technology-and data-driven urban management steered by governments, often in alliance with corporations, aimed at creating smarter cities for inhabitants Kourtit, Nijkamp, & Steenbruggen, 2017;. A prominent example is the South-Korean "smart city'' of Songdo, built completely from scratch. A ubiquitous computing environment is achieved through the extensive integration of information technologies to provide state-of-the-art urban supervision Shelton, Zook, & Wiig, 2015;. Computerization can also be implanted in existing cities.For instance, Singapore has established a solid technology base to optimise urban infrastructures and public services: it has a widespread data-driven sensor network for transport and energy, a fibreoptic network the length and width of the island, robot hospitals, autonomous -driverless -taxis, as well as vertical gardens and farms that regulate the temperature by absorbing and diffusing heat while collecting rainwater (Anthopoulos, Janssen,