Governing in the digital age: The emergence of dynamic smart urban governance modes

Abstract

There is growing concern that implementing effective governance constitutes a significant element in cities becoming ‘smart’ due to its multidisciplinarity, complexity of urban challenges and multi-stakeholder involvement. It is assumed that in smart city initiatives, new governance modes arise through the interplay of technological artefacts and political and social factors, viewed through a sociotechnical perspective. We also argue that traditional urban governance modes help explain emerging modes and the nature of citizen-government interactions. Thus, a combination of the sociotechnical view with the modes of urban governance as a theoretical approach was used to understand the dynamics of emerging governance modes in smart city initiatives. Two cases were studied using a longitudinal qualitative case study and temporal bracketing analysis for an in-depth understanding. Our findings evidenced that the configuration of the elements, governance mode, information and communication technology (ICT) and types of citizen-government interaction varies from one initiative to another and changes over time, across multiple sociotechnical networks in practice, which leads to emerging new governance modes. We highlight that a new understanding of smart urban governance for sustainable development in the digital age needs to be developed as a dynamic process. Moreover, we identified two emerging governance modes and proposed a dynamic approach to investigate smart urban governance in other contexts.