Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this articles investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development

The links between smart specialisation strategy, the quintuple helix model and living labs

This paper analyzes how the Living Labs can be designed as tools for a more effective implementation of the Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) within the Quintuple Helix Model. Above all, the Quintuple Helix espouses the formation of a constructive situation encompassing ecology, knowledge and innovation, and creating extensive synergy between economy, society, and democracy. In this paper, we shall be focusing on the Quintuple Helix and Living Labs geared towards creating a shared arena in which services, processes and new ways of working via technology can be developed and tested with user representatives and researchers. Since the Living Lab is a rather new research area, the number of supporting theories for understanding the concept is limited. The same is true when it comes to methodologies, methods and tools. The aim of the paper is to clarify these perspectives and to illustrate how they can enhance each other

Open Innovation and Co-creation in the Public Sector: Understanding the Role of Intermediaries

Part 4: Critical ReflectionsInternational audienceInnovation is a recurring theme in public administration. Governments around the world are always exploring innovation alternatives. However, the way public organizations innovate has evolved in the last few years from “in-house” innovation to open innovation. Although the literature is rich in references to innovation in the private sector, how open innovation processes can become a true and effective tool for governments is still an underexplored topic. The few studies that have tackled it have mainly addressed one main question: how can a successful private sector practice be introduced in public sector organizations? In contrast, this paper aims at making a contribution to the existing literature on open innovation in the public sector by addressing one issue that is key in open innovation processes: the role of intermediaries. Intermediaries are important actors in the open innovation ecosystem as they facilitate activities in all stages of the innovation process and help government agencies to achieve their goals

A Framework for a Smart City Design : Digital Transformation in the Helsinki Smart City

Recently, there has been substantial interest in the concept of a smart city, as it has been a viable solution to the dilemmas created by the urbanization of cities. Digital technologies—such as Internet-of-Things, artificial intelligence, big data, and geospatial technologies—are closely associated with the concept of a smart city. By means of modern digital technologies, cities aim to optimize their performance and services. Further, cities actively endorse modern digital technologies to foster digitalization and the emergence of data-based innovations and a knowledge economy. In this paper, a framework for a smart city design is presented. The framework considers a smart city from the perspective of four dimensions—strategy, technology, governance, and stakeholders. The framework is complemented with sub-dimensions, and the purpose of this framework is to strengthen the governance and sustainability of smart city initiatives. Further, the proposed framework is applied to the Helsinki smart city, the capital of Finland. The objective is to analyse the Helsinki smart city through dimensions presented in the framework and learn how the city of Helsinki governs and implements its smart city initiativespeerReviewe

Citizen Participation in Smart Government: A Conceptual Model and Two IoT Case Studies

In its simplest form, smart government can be understood as the combination of new technologies and organizational innovation strategies to further modernize the public sector. Within this development, the Internet of Things (IoT) often forms a key technological foundation, offering government authorities new possibilities for inter-action with citizens and local communities. On one hand, citizens can indirectly partic-ipate in governmental services’ value creation by using public infrastructure or (un)knowingly sharing their data with the community. On the other hand, smart gov-ernment initiatives may rely more intensively on citizens’ active participation to im-prove public service delivery, increase trust in government actions, and strengthen community sentiment. In this chapter, we discuss active and passive participation sce-narios of smart government initiatives and explain how sensor-based systems may en-hance citizens’ opportunities to participate in local governance. We present two prac-tical cases from Switzerland demonstrating these two citizen involvement modes. We argue that active and passive participation of citizens and other stakeholders play key role in generating necessary data for algorithmic decision-making to enable personal-ized interaction and real-time control of infrastructure in the future. We close with a discussion of the possibilities and boundaries of the IoT in the public sector and their possible influences on citizens’ private lives and policy-making