Exploring the Impacts of Social and Technical Aspects of Governance on Smart City Projects

Abstract

Highlights: What are the main findings? Smart city governance needs to be clearly defined to better understand its impact. Smart city governance plays a role on the adoption of smart city projects. Governance legitimacy appear to be more relevant for infrastructure projects. What is the implication of the main finding? City managers need to understand local forms of collaboration, power relationships, and interests of groups as they explain smart city developments. Successful smart city projects can be embraced as part of a general strategy, but also as focused efforts to solve city problems. Cities across the globe face a variety of social, economic, and environmental challenges, and building smart city systems has become a popular strategy, through a combination of institutional and organizational systems along with technological innovation. However, smart city projects drastically vary in scope and size, from building infrastructure for data gathering to improve policy, to developing more efficient government services, and even covering aspects of sustainable economic development or citizens’ quality of life. Applying perspectives from social informatics, we developed and tested two hypotheses using a dataset comprising 99 US cities to answer the following question: What is the impact of technical and social aspects of city governance mechanisms such as regulations, plans, and partnerships on the adoption of smart city projects? We study the adoption of smart city initiatives through the lenses of a comprehensive conceptualization of the smart city that includes the dimensions of government, infrastructure, and society. Our findings suggest that governance arrangements positively correlate with smart city projects in all three dimensions. We found, however, that legitimacy and inclusion aspects for governance may have a stronger impact on Smart Infrastructure projects. Future research is necessary to continue exploring the nuanced interactions between governance and smart city policy.