Governance in Smart Cities: A Comparison of Practitioners' Perceptions and Prior Research

Abstract

Many of the challenges to be faced by smart cities surpass the capacities, capabilities, and reaches of their traditional institutions and their classical processes of governing, and therefore new and innovative forms of governance are needed to meet these challenges. According to the network governance literature, governance models in public administrations can be categorized through the identification and analysis of some main dimensions that govern in the way of managing the city by governments. Based on prior research and on the perception of city practitioners in European smart cities, this paper seeks to analyze the relevance of main dimensions of governance models in smart cities as well as to identify differences among prior research and perceptions of practitioners regarding these dimensions. Results could shed some light regarding new future research on efficient patterns of governance models within smart cities.