Hacking Corporate Smart Cities Under COVID-19: Towards a Smart Governance Approach

ABSTRACTThe COVID-19 pandemic has imposed huge challenges on smart cities, requiring a reimagining and transformation of their governance structures. This viewpoint argues that a smart governance approach should be applied to remodel the uniform, often technocratic and corporate-led way of coping with COVID-19 in the smart city context. There is a need to develop more technology-enabled collaborative actions across sectors and among various actors to recover better from the pandemic. A far-sighted view is also needed to build citizen-centric open governance capacities—the emergent character of mass participation in cities—for readiness, responsiveness, and long-term resilience. The need for a robust communication policy is highlighted to transmit well-timed and critical information to a range of actors interested in smart city transformation.KEYWORDS: COVID-19information and communication technologysmart city governancetransformationurban resilience Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).AcknowledgmentsThe study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42201207; 72373137; 52000130), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. 310421102), Youth Fund of Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy (PLC) (grant no. 2222000255).Additional informationNotes on contributorsHuaxiong JiangHuaxiong Jiang is an assistant professor in the Department of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal UniversityHaozhi PanHaozhi Pan is an associate professor in the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200030 ShanghaiYanliu LinYanliu Lin is an associate professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, 3584 CB Utrecht, the NetherlandsStan GeertmanStan Geertman is a professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, 3584 CB Utrecht, the Netherlands.