Hacking Corporate Smart Cities Under COVID-19: Towards a Smart Governance Approach

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed huge challenges on smart cities, requiring a reimagining and transformation of their governance structures. This viewpoint argues that a smart governance approach should be applied to remodel the uniform, often technocratic and corporate-led way of coping with COVID-19 in the smart city context. There is a need to develop more technology-enabled collaborative actions across sectors and among various actors to recover better from the pandemic. A far-sighted view is also needed to build citizen-centric open governance capacities—the emergent character of mass participation in cities—for readiness, responsiveness, and long-term resilience. The need for a robust communication policy is highlighted to transmit well-timed and critical information to a range of actors interested in smart city transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• information and communication technology
• smart city governance
• transformation
• urban resilience

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

The study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42201207; 72373137; 52000130), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. 310421102), Youth Fund of Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy (PLC) (grant no. 2222000255).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huaxiong Jiang

Huaxiong Jiang is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

Haozhi Pan

Haozhi Pan is an associate professor in the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.

Yanliu Lin

Yanliu Lin is an associate professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Stan Geertman

Stan Geertman is a professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.