Cities around the world are facing increasingly complex problems. These problems frequently require collaboration and information sharing across agency boundaries. In our view, information sharing can be seen as an important dimension of what is recently being called smartness in cities and enables the ability to improve decision making and day-to-day operations in urban settings. Unfortunately, what many city managers are learning is that there are important challenges to sharing information both within their city and with others. Based on nonemergency service integration initiatives in New York City and Mexico City, this article examines important benefits from and challenges to information sharing in the context of what the participants characterize as smart city initiatives, particularly in large metropolitan areas. The research question guiding this study is as follows: To what extent do previous findings about information sharing hold in the context of city initiatives, particularly in megacities? The results provide evidence on the importance of some specific characteristics of cities and megalopolises and how they affect benefits and challenges of information sharing. For instance, cities seem to have more managerial flexibility than other jurisdictions such as state governments. In addition, megalopolises have most of the necessary technical skills and financial resources needed for information sharing and, therefore, these challenges are not as relevant as in other local governments.

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Purpose Blighted and vacant properties represent a persistent and costly problem for cities and local governments throughout the USA. The purpose of this paper is to identify data needs and requirements for value creation in the context of urban blight. The main assumption is that sharing and opening data through a robust and effective code enforcement program will facilitate more informed management, mitigation and remediation of blighted and vacant properties. Code enforcement programs must be grounded on organizational and technical infrastructures that enable data sharing and value creation for the city and the communities that share its space. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the information needs and realities of a city’s code enforcement environment are described, based on data gathered through a series of workshops and focus groups with a range of stakeholders, which included city government departments, police, fire, bank representatives, realtors and community groups. Findings The analysis reveals key data elements that could potentially help to build a code enforcement program to better manage the cycles and costs of urban blight. Although some of these data elements already exist, and are public, they are not easily accessible to key stakeholders. The paper ends with sets of short-term and long-term recommendations for establishing an information-sharing infrastructure, which would serve as the main conduit for exchanging code enforcement data among a number of city government departments and the public that may play a role in managing urban blight and its consequences. Originality/value In this paper, the authors are connecting extant literature on sharing and opening data with literature on the creation of public value. They argue that sharing and opening government data constitute effective ways of managing the costs and cycles of urban blight while creating value. As a result of an initial assessment of data and information requirements, the authors also point to specific data and its potential value from stakeholder perspective.