Governance Processes in Smart City Initiatives

Abstract

The Smart City concept is becoming a new urban development strategy. Dutch cities, like Amsterdam and Eindhoven, are trying to develop Smart Urban Districts, driven by European funding. In this effort Practitioners and academics notify many barriers towards successful implementation of Smart City initiatives. Apart from financial, technical, management and policy issues, more and more experts indicate governance as the key in realizing these complex projects. Therefore the aim of this thesis is to develop further insights in the governance of Smart City initiatives and the specific processes that can improve implementation. The proposed governance framework is based on the processes: collaboration, leadership and champion, partnership and participation, communication, service and application integration, data-exchange, transparency and accountability. The framework is applied for the analysis of two Dutch Smart City case studies Transform-Amsterdam and Triangulum-Eindhoven. The study concludes that collaboration is the core process of governance, mainly driven by leadership, partnership and participation, on the basis of transparency and accountability, supported by the other governance processes. No additional governance factors have been identified. The governance framework proved to be supportive in getting insight in the different processes of the specific Smart City initiatives. This framework, including the defined influencing processes, their mutual relations and the overview of success factors and barriers can be helpful to plan interventions to improve the critical factor of governance in the implementation of Smart City initiatives. The framework does not offer characteristics of maturity levels for each process.