Defining and assessing the transformational nature of smart city governance: insights from four European cases

Introduction

Over the last 10 years, smart cities emerged as an increasingly important field of research. Cities play a pivotal role as economic drivers and places of creativity and innovation (European Union, 2011), but, at the same time, cities have been increasingly urged to find effective and efficient solutions to wicked problems, such as globalisation, financial crises, climate change and environmental pollution. Several municipalities have coped with these challenges through the adoption of a smart city approach.

There is no agreement among scholars on a shared definition of a smart city (Angelidou, 2014, 2016, 2017a; Glasmeier and Nebiolo, 2016; Hollands, 2008, 2015; Meijer and Bolívar, 2015; Nam and Pardo, 2011; Neirotti et al., 2014; Vanolo, 2016). Its fuzzy nature is due to a stratification of concepts elaborated in different research areas, such as urban planning, geography, economic development and engineering (Meijer and Bolívar, 2015). It also depends on the lack of metrics to assess the real benefits generated by investments in smart city strategies (Angelidou, 2017a; Glasmeier and Nebiolo, 2016).

Meijer and Bolívar (2015) recently reviewed the literature on smart cities, identifying three main focuses around which the concept revolves: technologies, human resources and governance. The technological focus refers to the centrality of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to increase the efficiency of infrastructure and to improve the quality of local policies, especially those targeted at environmental sustainability (Angelidou, 2016). The human resource focus relates to the importance of a well-educated population and knowledge capital as drivers of urban growth and innovation (Angelidou, 2016). The governance focus emphasises the relevance of partnerships and networking among local stakeholders to foster innovation (Torfing, 2016). Drawing on these three components, Meijer and Bolívar (2015: 7) define the smartness of a city as ‘its ability to attract human capital and to mobilize this human capital in collaboration between the various (organized and individual) actors though the use of information and communication technologies’.

While the role of technologies and knowledge in smart cities has been extensively analysed by the literature, governance has only recently gained importance in the academic debate (Glasmeier and Nebiolo, 2016), so it still represents a topic not thoroughly investigated both at the theoretical and at the empirical level (Kitchin, 2015). In particular, current reflections are dominated by the idea that smart cities have – or should have – an inherently transformative connotation (Meijer and Bolívar, 2015) since traditional institutions do not have the right capacities to cope with new urban challenges (Angelidou, 2014; Bakıcı et al., 2013; Bolici and Mora, 2015; Nam and Pardo, 2011; Neirotti et al., 2014; Zygiaris, 2013). Yet, empirical research on the types and modes of governance adopted by smart cities is lacking.

The article is aimed at contributing to this literature by discussing whether the adoption of a smart city approach entails the transformation of existing administrative structures and practices and the transition to a real new system of governance. To this end, four cases of European smart cities are analysed: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Turin and Vienna. Using part of the data collected during a two-year research project on smart city governance, ¹ the article describes the models of governance adopted by the four smart cities, investigates the level of transformation that occurred in their governmental structures, outlines the main drawbacks and identifies possible connections with the emergent paradigm of the New Public Governance (NPG) (Osborne, 2006), with which smart city governance potentially shares several characteristics (Meijer and Bolívar, 2015).

The article proceeds as follows. Drawing on Pierre’s (2011) models of urban governance, the second section introduces the analytical framework and illustrates the methodology. In the third section, the framework is applied to the four smart cities to describe their governance approaches, and the fourth section compares empirical findings. The fifth and sixth sections examine whether and how a transformation of existing governance structures occurred in the four cities, as well as related challenges. Conclusions summarise findings, analyse them with reference to the NPG approach and suggest future lines of inquiry.

Analysing smart city governance: theoretical framework and methodology

In political science, governance can be defined as a new mode of managing complex societal issues based on the collaboration of government with non-public stakeholders (Bevir, 2013). Consequently, urban governance, or the governance of a city, can be defined as a collaborative process between governmental and non-governmental actors in the making of urban public policies (Blanco, 2014: 123). According to Pierre (2011), urban governance is characterised by nine elements (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Characteristics of urban governance.

Political objectives	Type of goals established by politico-administrative institutions.
Policy style	The way in which politico-administrative institutions make and implement policies given their relation with society. It can be pragmatic or ideological.
Political exchange	Type of relationship among parties within local politics. It can be consensual or conflictual.
Public–private exchange	Type of exchange between institutions and organised interests.
City–citizen relationship	Type of relationship between institutions and citizens. It can be inclusive or exclusive.
Primary contingency	Main actors responsible for the management of local contingencies.
Key instruments	Type of policy tools adopted to implement urban governance.
Patterns of subordination	Type of relationship between urban economic policy and politico-administrative institutions. It is negative when the latter is subordinated to the former and it does not contribute to its functioning; it is positive when politico-administrative institutions contribute to the economy.
Key evaluative criteria	Criteria adopted to assess the governance approach.

Source: Adapted from Pierre (2011).

Thus, the governance approach adopted by a city is determined by: the goals settled by political actors; the consensual or conflictual nature of the political debate among parties within local politics; and the more or less collaborative and inclusive type of exchange existing among local governments, organised interests and citizens. Urban governance is also shaped by: the type of actors in charge of managing contingencies; the policy style adopted to define and to implement local policies; the existing patterns of subordination between the local government and economy – which can be positive or negative, depending on the more or less active role performed by the politico-administrative system in local economic development (Pierre, 2011: 143); and the policy tools adopted to implement the governance approach. Finally, urban governance is characterised by the expected outcomes that it is supposed to achieve.

The framework just depicted is applied to describe the main elements of smart city governance that characterised Amsterdam, Barcelona, Turin and Vienna. Cities have been selected as typical cases of smart cities, rated by several indexes as the ‘smartest’ ones in the world. ² However, due to their differences in size, population and institutional organisation, they were compared as most dissimilar cases. Data and information about the goals, actors involved, structures and projects were collected though the qualitative analysis of reports and documents, as well as through semi-structured interviews with key informants (elected politicians, public officials, experts from academia and research centres, members of agencies, and public and private companies) conducted between 2015 and 2016. ³ Data collected from websites related to Amsterdam and Vienna were updated in November 2017. The analysis of Barcelona and Turin relates to the period 2010–2015, when Barcelona Smart City and Turin Smart City were successfully launched and consolidated by Mayor Xavier Triás and by Mayor Piero Fassino. Data related to these cities were updated in 2015.

Smart city governance in four European smart cities

Amsterdam was the first municipality that adopted a smart city strategy, following the creation of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (AMA). This process was aimed at strengthening the competitiveness of the territory and at transforming it into one of the most innovative regions in Europe by 2025. Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) was an integral part of this strategy. ASC was launched in 2009 by the Amsterdam Innovation Motor (AIM), ⁴ Liander, Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV (KPN), the Department for Environmental and Planning Sustainability of the Municipality and the independent research organisation, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). It was initially aimed at proposing initiatives to save energy and to reduce CO₂ emissions. ⁵ In 2013, AIM and the foundation KennisKring merged into the Amsterdam Economic Board (AEB), an independent foundation representing the municipalities, research centres and private sector of the metropolitan area. ⁶ In the same year, the AEB launched the Amsterdam Smart City Platform (ASCP), an online community of innovators that promotes solutions to urban problems. ⁷ The ultimate goal of the platform is to transform the AMA into a smart city through the adoption of a sustainable economy, the efficient use of natural resources and the promotion of a better quality of life for citizens. The platform is the online place ‘where public authorities, businesses, citizens, and knowledge institutions team up to tackle urban issues’ ⁸ and it is managed by a staff of 11 people who work for the Department of Economic Affairs of the municipality. Stable partners of the platform are the Municipality of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, private companies (Alliander, KPN, PostNl, Amsterdam Arena, Arcadis, Engie) and the residents of the city, represented by the foundation Waag Society – Institute for Art, Science and Technology, and by the organisation Parkhuis De Zwijger. On the ASCP, there are actually 236 projects listed, related to six areas: infrastructure and technology; energy, water and waste; mobility; circular city; governance and education; and citizens and living. ⁹ There are 372 partners involved in smart city projects, representing the main Dutch universities and research centres, banks, private companies and start-ups, associations, and foundations. ¹⁰ ASCP was created on the basis of previous experiences of partnerships between local authorities, private companies and research institutes (the so-called ‘triple helix model’).

Cooperative relationships between public and private actors are managed by public officials and are supported at all political levels (Interview no. 1). Smart city projects are carried out through a bottom-up, experimental approach. ‘Civic innovators’ – that is, foundations, private firms and research units – are encouraged to propose services or products through ASCP, and these ideas can be tested in the city (Interview no. 2). An example of this experimental approach was the Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab coordinated by the Waag Society, where citizens and experts collaborated to find solutions to local environmental problems (Nesti, 2017a).

At the origin of Barcelona Smart City (BSC), there was the project of urban regeneration launched in 2000 and aimed at recovering the declining industrial zone of Poblenou into the technological district 22@Barcelona (Battaglia and Tremblay, 2011: 6). The other relevant driver was the creation of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (BMA) in 2010, whose underlying ‘strategic proposal or Vision 2020 entails consolidating the BMA as a world-class metropolis: one of the most attractive and influential European regions for global innovative talent’ (Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona Association, 2010: 29). As part of this broad strategy, in 2011, Mayor Jordi Hereu signed an agreement with Cisco to create a network infrastructure and an Innovation Centre within Cisco’s project ‘Smart + Connected Communities’. ¹¹ BSC was thus conceived as:

a high-tech intensive and advanced city that connects people, information and city elements using new technologies aiming to increase quality of life, having more competitive and innovative business, making management and maintenance easier and cheaper, having a more sustainable and greener city. ¹²

The vision of BSC was ‘To become a city of productive neighbourhoods, at human speed, interconnected, eco-efficient, re-naturalised, energetically self-sufficient and regenerated at zero emissions, inside a high-speed interconnected Metropolitan Area’. ¹³ Operational responsibility for the smart city strategy was entrusted to Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives, chief of the department Habitat Urbá, a new office created in 2011 to overcome the fragmentation and lack of coordination among municipal units that had characterised the previous administration (Mora and Bolici, 2016). Habitat Urbá collaborated with other local key actors, such as the Barcelona Institute of Technology, the agency for economic development Barcelona Activa and the Catalan research centre i2Cat, and signed strategic agreements with private firms like Cisco, Abertis, GDF Suez, Schneider-Telvent, Telefónica and IBM (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2012: 5). The definition or selection and implementation of smart projects were entrusted to a Project Management Office (PMO) steered by Doxa Consulting and staffed with personnel from the company and the municipality (Mora and Bolici, 2015). Firms were allowed to test projects in the city, using neighbourhoods as Living Labs, like in the 22@Barcelona (Interview no. 3). Until 2015, BSC developed 79 smart city projects in the areas of: public and social services; environment; mobility; research and innovation; business; communications; infrastructures; tourism; and citizen cooperation.

The Torino Smart City project was launched in 2011 by Mayor Chiamparino explicitly to participate in the European call for funds under the Seventh Framework Programme (7FP). After the municipal elections in 2011, the project was carried out by the new mayor, Piero Fassino, and by the Executive Councillor for Innovation, Environment and the Smart City, both from the Democratic Party. The aim of Torino Smart City was to fight the sharp decline that was affecting the automotive sector and to reinforce the flourishing local ICT industry. Turin was also traditionally committed to promoting environmental sustainability since it was among the first European cities that signed the Covenant of Mayors in 2009.

The first step towards the smart city was the transformation of the Agency for Energy and Environment into the Torino Smart City Foundation for Sustainable Development. The foundation aimed to identify actions, projects and initiatives that contributed to improving the quality of life, economic development and environmental protection, also through participation in European Union (EU) calls for funds. The foundation was chaired by the Executive Councillor for Innovation and by a Steering Board, whose members were the Chair, the Executive Councillor for Urban Planning and the Executive Councillor for European Structural Funds. The Steering Board was supported by an Advisory Board – made of representatives from the university, the Polytechnic of Turin, the Chamber of Commerce, the local industrial association, San Paolo Bank and the multi-utility company IREN – and by a Scientific Committee made up of representatives from research centres and local consortia. The executive management depended on a director while projects were managed by two divisions: Energy Gate and Smart City. To implement its activities, the foundation signed several memoranda of understanding with other municipalities, public and private companies, and research centres. The municipality also appointed a Special Council Committee, ‘Smart City’, composed of 20 elected politicians, which supervised the smart city initiative and ‘was particularly able to involve all parties in the smart city project’ (Interview no. 4). The smart city strategy was structured around 45 projects collected in the Masterplan Smart Mobility, Inclusion, Life & Health, Energy (SMILE), which were selected in 2013 through a participatory approach that lasted five months and involved 350 participants from private firms, associations, agencies and research centres. The consultation was steered by the Municipality of Turin and by the foundation Torino Smart City, with the technical support of Torino Wireless and the economic support of the San Paolo Bank. Besides these projects, 32 other initiatives have been implemented through the Torino Living Lab, a project of the municipality aimed at promoting, developing and testing innovative products, technologies and services in a specific area of the city, Campidoglio, through the involvement of public administration, citizens and business companies (Nesti, 2017a).

The origin of the smart city initiative in Vienna can be traced back to Aspern Seestadt, a project of sustainable and smart urban development launched in Vienna in 2010 and involving several departments of the administration, research centres (among which the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT)), the Vienna Business Agency and other public and private partners. Aspern also operates as a laboratory where citizens and experts develop innovative ideas for local planning. In March 2011, the municipality created a consortium with local research centres, private firms and agencies to apply to the Austrian Fund for Climate and Energy ‘Smart Energy Demo FIT for SET’. On the basis of this collaboration, the Department of Planning of the municipality and AIT decided to launch the smart city project to optimise the already-existing experiences in green and sustainable planning and to attract EU funds for research and development (R&D). The municipality defined the basic strategic framework for the smart city project in 2011 through the organisation of three forums with representatives from the municipality, the academic community, the business sector and civil society, as well as through several meetings with experts. The output was the publication of three non-binding documents – ‘Smart energy vision 2050’, ‘Roadmap 2020 and beyond’ and the ‘Action plan for 2012–2015’ – which, together with the ‘Development plan’, the ‘Climate Change Programme’ and the ‘Energy Efficiency Programme’, were the basis for the following smart city strategy. The final ‘Smart City Wien Framework Strategy’ was officially launched by the mayor, Michael Haüpl, in 2013 and its goal was ‘to significantly reduce the amount of resources the city consumes, while at the same time maintaining social cohesion and continuing to offer a very high quality of life to all its inhabitants’ (Vienna City Council, 2014: 2). The framework consists of three key topics: quality of living; resources preservation; and innovation. The project Smart City Wien (SCW) is under the political responsibility of the Executive Councillor for Urban Planning.

Until 2017, the general strategy of SCW was defined by a high-level group made by the Head of the Department of Urban Planning, the Head of the Department of Energy Planning, the Chief Executive Officer and representatives of municipal companies. SCW was managed by a team representing all partners and by the Smart City Wien Agency (SCWA), a branch of TINA Vienna GmbH, the municipal company that coordinated projects for R&D, mobility and transport. Both groups were advised by an expert team made up of national and international researchers. SCWA was responsible for coordinating the whole process, ensuring connections between stakeholders, implementing projects and fundraising. Coordination took place through regular meetings involving the agency, the Director of the Department for Urban Planning, representatives of other departments and companies. This team was also responsible for selecting projects to be included in the strategy. In January 2017, Tina Vienna merged with Europaforum Wien, a consulting agency and service provider founded by the City of Vienna, forming the new company Urban Innovation Vienna.

SCW is currently running 90 projects in the areas of: education; digitalisation; energy; buildings; health; infrastructure; innovation; mobility; social affairs; urban development; and environment. ¹⁴ Vienna is recognised as an example of best practice in managing smart projects thanks to its tradition of environmental participatory planning, where the city plays an important networking role (Van Beurden, 2011).

Comparing smart city governance approaches across cities

How is smart city governance organised? Table 2 summarises the main characteristics of the approaches followed in each city described earlier.

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Table 2.

Smart city governance in four cities.

	Amsterdam	Barcelona	Turin	Vienna
Political objectives	Sustainability Economic development Better quality of life	Sustainability Economic development Better quality of life Efficient PA	Sustainability Economic development Better quality of life Participation in EU calls	Sustainability Better quality of life Innovation Participation in EU calls
Policy style	Pragmatic	Pragmatic	Pragmatic	Pragmatic
Political exchange	Consensual	Consensual	Consensual	Consensual
Public–private exchange	Collaborative	Collaborative	Collaborative	Collaborative
City–citizen relationship	Inclusive	Inclusive	Inclusive	Inclusive
Primary contingency	Public officials	Political leaders	Political leaders	Public officials
Key instruments	PPP and ULL	PPP and ULL	PPP and ULL	PPP and ULL
Patterns of subordination	Positive	Positive	Positive	Positive
Key evaluative criterion	Innovation	Innovation	Innovation	Sustainability Quality of life

Note: ULL = Urban Living Lab; PPP = Public and Private Partnership.

Source: Adapted from Pierre (2011).

For what concerns the motivations to become smart, three rationales emerge as dominant. The first one is the implementation of better policies for environmental sustainability. In all four cases, in fact, the smart city strategy was targeted at integrating and consolidating measures against climate change, energy consumption and pollution through the adoption of ICT-based products. The second goal is economic. Cities also decided to become smart to attract new investments and to strengthen their local economy. The third goal is the improvement of the quality of life of citizens, for instance, through interventions in the fields of healthcare and social inclusion (like in Vienna). Besides these common goals, a more efficient administration (Barcelona), the promotion of innovation (Vienna) and participation in EU calls for funding (Turin and Vienna) are also mentioned as relevant.

Smart city governance is steered by mayors (Barcelona) and executive councillors (Turin) or by public officials (Amsterdam and Vienna). Public actors are crucial in coordinating the overall smart city strategy and in managing negotiations alongside the governance process. Political and administrative commitments are, in fact, fundamental to involving stakeholders and to mediating among different interests in order to define a shared strategic vision of the smart city.

A common feature of the four governance approaches is the involvement of all local stakeholders – private companies, research centres and civil society organisations – in the process of the definition and implementation of the smart city strategy. This finding confirms Meijer and Bolívar’s (2015: 9) conceptualisation of smart city governance as smart urban collaboration. Relationships among actors – both inside municipal institutions and between public and private actors – are extremely cooperative, and the adoption of a smart city strategy is hardly contested. Collaboration with companies is strongly encouraged by politico-administrative elites as a means of mobilising private resources and of boosting the local economy. Thus, the policy style adopted by politico-administrative actors is extremely pragmatic.

The main policy tools adopted to manage collaboration range from quasi-markets and Public and Private Partnerships (PPPs), such as public procurement, project financing or competitive dialogues, to more informal and innovative forms of cooperation based on the active engagement of citizens. These collaborations, also labelled Public, Private and People Partnerships (PPPPs) take the forms of Urban Living Labs (ULLs), which are real-life environments usually managed by the municipality in collaboration with civil society organisations or research centres where citizens, experts and private companies co-design, co-produce and, where appropriate, test services and products for the city (Nesti, 2017c). ULLs are present in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Turin and Vienna as integral parts of their smart city strategy. They can promote citizen participation in urban planning or in creating tools and applications to measure and to analyse local environmental data; they can recruit citizens to test some smart products in selected city districts; and, finally, they can engage citizens in developing apps and technological devices to improve local services. However, citizens are actively involved in project co-design and implementation but they do not usually participate in governance processes or in defining the overall smart city strategy of the municipality (Nesti, 2017b).

Finally, smart city governance developed by the four cities can be assessed against the criteria of sustainability, innovation and better quality of life. These elements are also adopted by consultancies and international organisations to rank cities through indexes and awards. Indeed, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Turin won the European Capital of Innovation Award, while Vienna is the European city with the highest quality of life according to Mercer’s Quality of Living City Ranking. ¹⁵

Smart city governance between continuity and change

The approach adopted by municipalities to cope with smart city governance derives from previous experiences of collaboration with local stakeholders, especially through participatory planning. However, engaging critical actors in the creation of innovative projects through experimental policy design prompted municipalities to find new ways to manage interactions more efficiently. Several interviewees agreed, in fact, that the need to find better ways to overcome ‘silo thinking’ in order to cope with smart city strategies led administrations to rethink their organisation. In Amsterdam, ‘the Board was created to improve coordination among departments’ (Interview no. 1). In Barcelona ‘Mayor Triàs constituted the new department Habitat Urbá, bringing together all the departments dealing with smart city issues such as ICTs, planning, energy, etc., to facilitate collaboration on urban matters’ (Interview no. 3). The municipality of Turin pursued integration between policy areas at the politico-administrative level through the establishment of the Torino Smart City Foundation (Interview no. 5) and through the participatory process that led to the elaboration of the Masterplan SMILE (Interview no. 6). Finally, the municipality of Vienna enhanced coordination and cooperation between stakeholders and internal departments in order to modernise its working methods through the creation of the various committees that steered the SCFW and through the establishment of the SCWA for the implementation of projects (Interviews nos 7 and 8). Thus, all four municipalities perceived the adoption of a smart city strategy as a challenging task, requiring a certain amount of transformation of existing governance processes and institutions. Part of the strategy to make a city intelligent entailed the reorganisation of existing government structures and the introduction of new organisational arrangements in order to provide the smart city with a more suited system of governance.

In all four municipalities, the creation of the smart city resulted in deciding how to include stakeholders in governance processes in order to facilitate negotiated decisions, how to find more flexible ways to manage collaboration with partners and, finally, how to integrate the different political and/or administrative components in a unique decision-making centre in order to avoid fragmentation. In the case of Amsterdam and Turin, the choice to locate the structure of governance (the Board and the Foundation) outside the municipality was influenced by the presence of already-existing external governance structures, that is, the AIM, the KennisKring foundation and the Agency for Energy and Environment. Barcelona and Vienna, on the other side, preferred to maintain governance functions within the city administration though the creation of a new, integrated department or using committees managed by public officials. A Viennese officer, in fact, claimed that ‘the normal city administration can do the governance of the smart city.… Our governance works well because the city administration steers the process’ (Interview no. 7).

Local stakeholders, mainly firms, civil society organisations or associations, and research centres, have been involved in governance processes through direct participation in governing bodies (like in the AEB of Amsterdam) or in advisory committees (like in Turin and Vienna) or through agreements designed to collaborate on specific projects, a strategy adopted in all four cities.

Main challenges to smart city governance

At present, it is not clear whether new smart city governance models and relative governmental structures have really produced a deep transformation of local administration, more effective decision-making and the achievement of successful results. On the one side, in fact, several people interviewed, in particular from Turin, argued that cooperation between departments in charge of implementing the projects was difficult and that competition sometimes emerged between politicians and units involved in smart city projects: ‘More coordination is needed because the Italian public administration still works with a vertical logic, not with a transversal one. To date, successful experiences rely more on individual voluntary cooperation than on a systematic approach to collaboration’ (Interview no. 9). Another interviewee argued that ‘The real challenge is to create a new administrative culture.… This job is intriguing but also exhausting because everything is new and you should find solutions day by day’ (Interview no. 10). On the other side, since evaluations of results achieved through the smart city approach are not yet available, it is difficult to correlate successful smart city initiatives with the implementation of new governance arrangements.

A second important challenge to smart city governance is the effective implementation of policy tools enabling collaboration among actors. Both in Barcelona and Turin, in fact, interviewees complained about the presence of a regulatory environment discouraging PPP: ‘Partnerships for innovative projects are hard to be implemented in Italy because national regulation is inadequate to support them’ (Interview no. 9); while in Barcelona, ‘innovation in public procurement is still underdeveloped because policymakers don’t want to take risks’ (Interview no. 11). However, collaboration with civil society through ULLs is also often weak because they frequently only represent episodic experiences that are difficult to scale up or to funnel into mainstream policymaking (Nesti, 2017a, 2017c).

The third challenge for smart city governance is represented by its weak democratic legitimacy. A critical issue in smart cities that emerged from the empirical analysis is the exclusion of citizens from governance structures and strategic decision-making processes (Angelidou, 2017b), an exclusion that is only partially compensated by civic engagement in co-creating products or services for the ordinary ‘smart life’ (Nesti, 2017b). Turin and Vienna explicitly proposed in their strategies a people-centred approach to the smart city based on a deep understanding of citizens’ needs, and all four cities have been particularly active in enabling grassroots innovation (Capdevilla and Zarlenga, 2015; Haüpl, 2016; Lavolta, 2016; Van Winden et al., 2016). However, this process has sometimes proven to be very challenging, like in Barcelona, where associations of neighbourhoods heavily protested against the 22@ project, accusing the municipality of privileging real-estate interests over citizens’ concerns (Battaglia and Tremblay, 2011; Capdevilla and Zarlenga, 2015). The real issue here is to demonstrate the adjunct value produced by smart cities in solving urban societal problems (Angelidou, 2017b; Harrison, 2017; Hollands, 2015) and in fostering more accountability and democratic legitimacy (Nesti, 2017b).

The final challenge for a smart city is its long-term sustainability at both the policy and political level. First, smart city projects run the risk of ending because funds end (Interview no. 5), a problem also highlighted by Pierce and Andersson (2017) in their research. Second, they run the risk of remaining limited experimentations that cease to exist once they have been completed, without consolidating potential effective results. Furthermore, Barcelona and Turin are examples of how politics can lead or reverse the transition to a smart city model. Under Mayor Triás, in fact, Barcelona became one of the smartest cities in Europe. However, in 2015, Ada Colau was elected as the new mayor and she never supported the Triás project, which she defined a too monopolised by economic elites. ¹⁶ Thus, under her administration, BSC has been transformed into Barcelona Digital City, an innovative project that puts citizens’ needs and grassroots participation at the core of its strategy. In Turin, the new mayor, Appendino, from the Five Star Movement appointed an Executive Councillor for the smart city who criticised Mayor Fassino’s strategy (Forum PA, 2016). Moreover, with the view to rationalising resources, in June 2017, the Executive Council decided to merge several municipal entities for urban development, among which was the Torino Smart City Foundation, into a new one that is yet not operating. ¹⁷ Furthermore, in Vienna, changes are also occurring at the organisational level. Thus, the last and probably greater problem for policymakers is to ensure that benefits deriving from the adoption of a smart city perspective will be translated into durable achievements for the community. This can only be achieved by abandoning techno-deterministic and branding approaches to the smart city and by using smart city governance as an opportunity to change the traditional administrative policy style into a new approach more suited to fostering innovation.

Conclusions

Smart cities have become a very popular approach to solving complex urban problems like environmental sustainability, economic recovery and social cohesion. The analysis presented earlier highlights that smart cities represent a model of governance based on collaboration between local stakeholders, citizen participation, experimental innovation and a holistic approach to the development of local policies. In order to foster an integrated vision of the process of innovation and to facilitate collaboration with partners, public actors created different governmental structures, internal or external to the administration, and adopted various policy tools.

Smart city governance would potentially support the transformation of traditional public administration into NPG (Osborne, 2006). Smart city governance, in fact, has several characteristics in common with NPG, for example: the creation of partnerships with private actors and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to solve wicked problems; the promotion of efficiency, quality and innovation; the presence of strong political leadership; the active engagement of citizens in co-producing services; and the presence of public officials performing the role of service facilitator and boundary-spanning (Torfing and Triantafillou, 2016). Nevertheless, a possible transition to NPG is still hampered by several constraints.

First, smart city governance usually works in parallel with the rest of the city administration. Smart cities are, in fact, managed with new structures and tools that are usually placed outside the politico-administrative system without being part of ordinary urban governance.

Second, since smart city projects are often promoted by political leaders for electoral purposes – as Hollands (2008: 304) rightly argues, ‘what city does not want to be smart or intelligent? – they become a highly politicised issue that run the risk of being politically unsustainable in the long term. Moreover, smart cities became extremely popular when the EU (and in Italy, when the Italian Ministry for Research) granted funds for them within the Seventh Framework Programme (Vanolo, 2014) or thanks to the presence of private investment. Without external funds, several cities were unable to support their smart projects (Pierce and Andersson, 2017).

Finally, the smart city paradigm needs to clearly demonstrate with tangible results that it is not a mere technological utopia, but can produce public value for citizens (Glasmeier and Nebiolo, 2016; Vanolo, 2016) in a better way than traditional administration. Further research on ongoing experiences like Amsterdam and Vienna could help us in assessing the long-term sustainability of smart city approaches and in better understanding changes in and implications for governance dynamics.