The Governance Approach of Smart City Initiatives. Evidence from Trondheim, Bergen, and Bodø

Abstract

A pragmatic and polity-focused solution for governing a smart city in the direction of sustainability is still missing in theory and practice. A debate about whether a smart city is a pragmatic solution for modern challenges or just a technology-led urban utopia is entangled with the vexed issue of governance. While ‘smart governance’ has drawn unprecedented interest, the combination of its conceptual vagueness and broad applications couple with a lack of focus on its underlying international and local political paradigms have raised concerns about its utility. This study contributes to restoring attention to the original concept of governance, its differences with governing and government, and the potential challenges resulting from its functionality in its real, multi-layered, and complex contexts. This paper explores the intellectual connection between governance and smart cities, from both an empirical and a conceptual/analytical perspective. From the empirical side, we examine which actors, processes, and relational mechanisms at different levels that have had an impact on the initiation of smart cities in three Norwegian cities: Trondheim, Bergen, and Bodø. We illustrate how the structural sources of the interests, roles, and power in smart city initiatives have caused governance to emerge and change, but have also affected the goals designed by specific actors.

Prevailing Approaches and Practices of Citizen Participation in Smart City Projects: Lessons from Trondheim, Norway

“…Moreover, external board evaluation or research on the quality of participation in the three levels of "by, of, and for" people, in practice, may be helpful to assess democratic values, such as community-building, trust, representation, efficiency, and influence. Further research is also valuable, to extend or compare the findings of this research with other smart city projects that are developed within the formal planning system [65].…”

“…The neoliberal ideology and the subsequent smart city projects have caused technical, political, and economic goals to surpass social and environmental goals. Thus, it is difficult to estimate to what extent existing smart city processes or projects can keep up with a city's original expectations and ideals, such as enhanced citizen participation [65]. The dependency on competitive funding of the EU has influenced the goal-setting of the project, in which neither citizens nor their representatives engaged.…”

Smart Cities Landscape and Urban Planning for Sustainability in Brno City

“…The impact of human capital is indispensable in developing and governing smart cities. As several researchers suggest, governments must ensure that citizens attain sufficient technical and education skills to help them navigate the smart city environment [42]. Another study provided an example of the Romanian government, which created "knowledge cities" by launching e-government portals to engage stakeholders in the private and public sectors' vital services [43].…”

“…This is shown in the plans and can also be seen physically on the earth maps and by observation. We observed that according to the prerequisites of smart and sustainable cities, Brno has done very well even if it still has a lot to do to keep the balance [22,41,42,[58][59][60][61].…”

“…However, there are many green zones in Brno. Some of these are playfields while others are arboretum gardens with various vegetations (Figures 5 and 7) [41][42][43][57][58][59][60][61]. These serve as leisure spaces for the city dwellers and tourists since some of them are conserved by international declarations.…”