Informating Smart Cities Governance? Let Us First Understand the Atoms!
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Informating Smart Cities Governance? Let Us First Understand the Atoms! Alois Paulin 1
Received: 11 September 2015 / Accepted: 8 March 2016 / Published online: 6 April 2016 # The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract This paper discusses the atomic factors that make up governance with a focus on Smart Cities informatability. The guiding question is whether or not, or how, respectively, governance can be informated; informatization is defined as the ability of systems to be steered/controlled/created from within the digital dimension by means of software tools and applications. The disciplinary theories of Downs (public choice theory), Jellinek (Statuslehre), and Hohfeld (fundamental legal conceptions) are confronted with the abilities of modern information and communication technology in the quest to apply them for informatization of governance. It is found that the atomic components of governance identified by these theories cannot be directly informated; there is however indication for their indirect informatability, which is discussed further. The vision of a society in which governance is informated is presented after the discussion to aid in understanding of the context, its potentials, and the relevance of basic research for sustainable governance evolution. Keywords e-Governance . Jural eligibilities . Informating governance . Beyond bureaucracy
Introduction Born and raised as a marketing term in mid-‘90s (and in a second wave in the late ‘00s) (Söderström et al. 2014), the BSmart City^ remains a reference to a set of broad concepts referring to trends and transformations in the context of modern urban spaces. It partly, but not exclusively (Söderström et al. 2014; Anthopoulos 2015), refers to the utilization of ICT to introduce transformations and enable new value chains on the government to citizen (G → C) relation between the city as a public sphere and the
* Alois Paulin [email protected]
1
Vienna University of Technology–Faculty of Informatics, Favoritenstr. 9-11, 1040 Vienna, Austria
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J Knowl Econ (2016) 7:329–343
citizens as its customers. Amongst the manifold dimensions of the Smart City concept (Anthopoulos and Fitsilis 2013), the provision of e-governance and e-democracy features on city-level are relevant objectives. As such, Smart City research and development (R&D) activities overlap with the broader domain of e-governance research, whose objective is the computerization and informatization of governance to an extent where latter is hoped to become transformed by means of ICT. R&D and marketing activities of Smart Cities assume cities as homogeneous entities, which provide services to their citizens; based on this premise, IBM’s Smarter Cites campaign (a prominent and potent driver of the Smart City concept) projects the city as a coherent system-of-systems, whose social functions can be automated and orchestrated through a central information system, like e.g. IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center (Söderström et al. 2014). The assumptio
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