Who governs 4.0? Varieties of smart cities

ABSTRACT

Research on smart cities is still at an early stage. The conjecture of this article is that smart city strategies and their impacts will inevitably vary across contexts; however, the debate still lacks an analytical toolkit that guides the exploration of such varieties (and similarities) of smart cities. Combining existing research on the governance of smart cities with theories of business–state relations from political economy, this article develops an analytical framework and typology that captures varieties (and similarities) of smart city policies and governance. We apply this framework to four illustrative cases: Prague, Barcelona, Berlin, and Rio de Janeiro.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart cities
• civil society
• technocracy
• political mobilization
• governance

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank the students of the Hertie School participating in our seminars on smart city in 2018 and 2019. The argument presented in this paper was tested and challenged in these courses. We also thank Paolo Cardullo for his comments and valuable advice on the early versions of the article. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which have helped us to improve the argument and the quality of our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/imi/sites/default/files/BCN_Digital.pdf.

2. http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/sites/default/files/le_mesuradegovern_v2.pdf.

3. Pavel Bém (ODS) was the mayor of Prague from 2002 to 2010; several large-scale corruption scandals were uncovered during his mandate.

4. https://digitalcityindex.eu.

5. https://www.berlin-partner.de/en/the-berlin-location/smart-city-berlin/.

6. https://www.smart-city-berlin.de (accessed 17/05/2019).

7. https://fuckoffgoogle.de (accessed 17/05/2019).

8. https://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_paes_the_4_commandments_of_cities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eliska Drapalova

Eliska Drapalova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, Gothenburg University. Previously, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hertie School. She is a political scientist with research interests in quality of government, political economy and regional and local governance. Drápalová obtained her Ph.D. in Political Economy from the European University Institute in Florence.

Kai Wegrich

Kai Wegrich is Professor of Public Administration and Public Policy at the Hertie School of Governance. He is a political scientist with research interests in executive politics, regulation, public sector reform and innovations in policy-making. He is co-editor of the book series on Executive Politics and Governance (with Palgrave).