Defining and assessing the transformational nature of smart city governance: insights from four European cases

Points for practitioners The article offers in-depth insights about how smart governance is implemented in practice. It outlines the smart city model of urban governance as the result of specific goals, relationships among stakeholders, policy styles and policy tools. Smart governance entails the adoption of a new approach based on experimentation, collaboration with all local stakeholders and the reorganisation of existing government structures. This process should be driven by public actors and should be supported by appropriate tools to manage interactions, to foster coordination, to enhance democratic legitimacy and accountability, and to ensure tangible results for citizens. Smart cities are a new approach to urban development based on the extensive use of information and communication technologies and on the promotion of environmental sustainability, economic development and innovation. The article is aimed at discussing whether the adoption of a smart city approach entails the transformation of existing institutional structures and administrative practices. To this end, four cases of European smart cities are analysed: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Turin and Vienna. The article describes their models of governance, investigates the level of transformation that occurred in their governmental structures, outlines the main drawbacks and identifies possible connections with the emergent paradigm of the New Public Governance.