Informing urban governance? Boundary‐spanning organisations and the ecosystem of urban data

Abstract

In urban policy there is an increasing emphasis on the management and sharing of information in and about cities. This paper focuses on external sharing practices which are facilitated by boundary-spanning organisations. Boundary-spanning organisations are hybrid structures that provide a platform to link internal networks of the city government with external actors, and in particular focus on engaging various types of stakeholders. The paper offers a preliminary assessment of a sample of boundary-spanning organisations based across six case studies (Barcelona, Chicago, London, Medellin, Mexico City and Seoul) and across three types of BSOs: living labs, innovation districts and sector-oriented BSOs.Unpacking the shape and development of BSOs, and "placing" them in urban governance, we begin to sketch a preliminary agenda geared to offer a better appreciation of the "information ecosystem" underneath policy-making in cities. K E Y W O R D Sboundary-spanning organisation, information ecosystem, innovation districts, living lab, smart cities, urban governance | AN "INFORMED CITIES" PARADIGM?After a steady rise in popularity across policy and academia, "data" is very much at the heart of urban issues, if not a paradigm shift in how we conceive of urban governance. This data-driven view has become a dominant rhetoric in many local, national and international fora concerned with urban matters in both the Global South and North -as recently testified in major United Nations processes from the Habitat III summit to the UN World Data Forum. At the latter, the UN recognised in its Cape Town Global Action Plan how "quality and timely data are vital for enabling governments" to make "informed decisions" as today's global sustainable development agendas "require the collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of an unprecedented amount of data and statistics at local, national, regional and global levels and by multiple stakeholders." 1 From the lures of the smart city to the rise of indexing and reporting about cities and the vast impact of philanthropic investments, then, what we might call an "informed cities" paradigm of data-driven urban discussions is one of the most defining discussions in urban policy-making of our time. It feeds a widespread belief in data as key ingredient to urban policy, from competitiveness, to good governance, accountability and transparency (Hordijk & Baud, 2006;Sotarauta, 2016), as well as in the "information"-intensive advantages brought about by information-intensive sectors, products and activities (Carillo, 2011). The "informed cities" paradigm seems to be more than just a fad and is likely to influence policy in the years to come. As Nigel Thrift (2014) noted, the promises of urban informatics and data-driven urbanism, whetherThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The information, practices and views in this article are...

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