Activity types, thematic domains, and stakeholder constellations: explaining civil society involvement in Amsterdam’s smart city

ABSTRACT

Smart city development increasingly involves civil society stakeholders (CSS) because they constitute legitimate stakeholders concerning digitalized urban public goods. As users, however, CSS are involved because they improve smart city activities by providing tacit day-to-day knowledge. Distinguishing between socially and economically orientated CSS allows us to compare the involvement of legitimate stakeholders to user involvement and to unravel the factors influencing the involvement of CSS in smart city activities. For this, we build a framework that not only discerns between socially- and economically-orientated CSS but also distinguishes between three types of socio-technical factors that either limit or increase civil society involvement in smart city activities: (1) the activity’s type (2) the activity’s thematic domain, and (3) stakeholder constellations linked to the activity. Using chi-square-tests and logistic regressions we inquire into how the socio-technical factors defined in our framework influence the involvement of social and economic CSS in Amsterdam’s smart city activities. Our results show that the dominant thematic domains and the most common stakeholder constellations that characterize in Amsterdam’s smart city activities limit the involvement of social CSS. CSS involvement in smart city activities thus mainly entails the involvement of economically-orientated CSS.

KEYWORDS:

• Social civil society
• economic civil society
• smart city
• socio-technical systems
• Amsterdam

Acknowledgements

This study is part of the research project “Smart Cities: The Standardization of Cities?”, which is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I thank Gernot Grabher, Erwin van Tuijl, Joachim Thiel and the two anonymous reviewers for their extensive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Of course, the responsibility of the content of this article is of the author alone.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Dameri (2017) proposes a similar approach that disentangles technological, institutional, and human factors that shape smart city development. However, particularly the ‘technological factors’ do not fit our understanding of artifacts and practices which go beyond the description of technological tools and rather look into the overall type of output an activity aims to produce.

2 amsterdamsmartcity.com (accessed on October 12th 2020).

3 Also based on interview data with members of the ASC.

4 Mora et al. (2019b) use a similar approach in a comparative case study of four smart city initiatives and suggest that Amsterdam has 97 smart city projects. Recently added activities, as well as, the treatment of projects of large project consortia as individual activities, to increase inter-activity comparability, explain the difference between Mora et al’s 97 and our 165 smart city activities.

5 33 of 977 stakeholders could not be identified or not be coded due to insufficient data. This means that in the case of 9 smart city activities, this missing data could cause one variable describing the stakeholder constellations to be incorrect. We simulated different scenarios of what missing data could be and found that the missing categorization does not affect the findings.

6 https://amsterdamsmartcity.com/p/faq (accessed April 20th 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG): grant number GR1913/14-1.