Direct Democracy as the Keystone of Smart City Governance as a Complex System

Abstract

We consider the smart city not as an addition of « smarties» (technological devices) but as a system capable of evolution all along its lifecycle, described as Urban Lifecycle Management (Rochet 2015) since a city never dies and must be able to reconfigure itself while its internal and external environment changes. The literature on cities as evolving ecosystems (Batty 2015) considers this evolutionary process can't be steered in top down way, either by a supra rational actor or on a self-regulating basis as claimed by the authors of the first order cybernetics. By integrating all the components of this evolution in the context of iconomics (economics of the III° industrial revolution) we examine why direct democracy appears to be the best drivers for this regulation and what could be its underpinning collective future oriented sensemaking dynamics