Innovative Urban governance: A game oriented approach to influencing energy behavior

Abstract

We are moving fast toward a smart urban era in which all components of our dominating urban life need to be not only sensing and smart but also learning and cognitive. This includes all stakeholders of the extensive network of urban systems and their governing body structure all across societal sectors. From this perspective, and considering the two key concepts of sensing and learning, the focus of the future efforts should be on education and collaboration among stakeholders to increase the entire system’s reliability and effectiveness. There’s also the obvious factor of infrastructure for machine-based sensing, which is becoming more available through the use of smart devices as well as venues for connectivity, which is fortunately possible by advancements and availability of social networking technology nowadays. Moreover, urban stakeholders’ collaboration is also known to foster sustainable development, when accompanies a detailed plan for influencing behavioral patterns in city networks. Creating a dynamic methodology for policymaking through quantitative and computational governing mechanisms could be considered as a solution. The premise of this chapter is that innovative urban governance can effectively influence the desired impact and behavior through using technological tools such as city sensors and smart devices. Since administration of social games in smart urban environments are known as one of such governing mechanism, we have applied the theories of interactive collaboration to a simple yet effective game, which involves citizens of an isolated environment with dynamic adjustment of their behavior with regards to energy consumption. The presented case of Hoboken in this chapter is focused on evaluation of behavioral change among residents of Stevens Institute of Technology, given the right collective information and provided the sustainable incentive structure. As a part of this research, the results of the experiment with on campus residents were analyzed against similar information collected from citizens of Hoboken. The results of our research supports the hypothesis that people will choose a sustainable alternative when given the right information and provided with incentives to do so.