On the Way to Smarter Cities: What Goals and Values Swiss Municipalities Prioritize

Abstract

Smart cities have become a trending topic in transdisciplinary discourses and academic research over recent decades. In the context of modern governmental institutions striving to create public value for the benefit of their inhabitants, smart cities play a pivotal role. While aspiring to encourage the transformation towards smart cities, it is essential to carry out strategy development and accompanying monitoring processes using key performance indicators (KPIs). Even though smart cities have received much attention by scholars, the link between public value and smart city strategy development and monitoring is empirically under-researched. This study, therefore, investigates 280 Swiss municipalities – public actors on the frontline – to determine where they set smart city goals, the relevance they assign to selected KPIs to measure progress, and what this reveals about underlying public values. The results indicate that Swiss municipalities prioritize action fields regarding sustainable city development, energy efficiency, public transport, and traffic management. While only a minority already uses KPIs to measure progress, a majority plans to use them in the future. Our analysis, linking the prioritized action fields, corresponding KPIs and public value types, suggests that the public value currently generated by municipalities is located primarily in the social and stewardship dimension, but that in the future, environmental and political public value could move into the foreground.