Article

Social Science Computer Review

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ª The Author(s) 2015
Smart City Research: Reprints and permission:
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Contextual Conditions, DOI: 10.1177/0894439315618890
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Governance Models, and
Public Value Assessment

Albert J. Meijer1, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia2,3,

and Manuel Pedro Rodrı́guez Bolı́var4

Abstract
There are three issues that are crucial to advancing our academic understanding of smart cities:
(1) contextual conditions, (2) governance models, and (3) the assessment of public value. A brief
review of recent literature and the analysis of the included papers provide support for the
assumption that cities cannot simply copy good practices but must develop approaches that fit their
own situation (contingency) and concord with their own organization in terms of broader strategies,
human resource policies, information policies, and so on (configuration). A variety of insights into the
mechanisms and building blocks of smart city practices are presented, and issues for further research
are identified.

Keywords
smart city, contextual conditions, governance models, public value

Introduction
A smart city is a utopian vision of a city that produces wealth, sustainability, and well-being by using
technologies to tackle wicked problems (Greenfield, 2013). The idea of a smart city is attractive
to policy makers, but empirical research is needed to advance our academic understanding of the
new ‘‘marriage’’ between technology and urban governance (Meijer & Rodrı́guez Bolı́var, 2015).
A strong understanding of contextual conditions, governance models, and public value is needed
to develop realistic smart city strategies. This special issue presents a diverse set of papers that pro-
vide state-of-the-art insights into these pressing issues of smart city research.

1
Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
2
University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA
3
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Ciudad de México, Mexico
4
School of Business Studies, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Corresponding Author:
Manuel Pedro Rodrı́guez Bolı́var, School of Business Studies, University of Granada, C./ Campus Universitario de Cartuja, s/n
P. O. Box 18071, Granada, Spain.
Email: [email protected]

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2 Social Science Computer Review

The focus of ‘‘smart cities’’ research for governments has typically been on how cities might
improve urban economies, quality of life, and myriad problems by employing information and com-
munication technologies (ICTs; Gil-Garcia, Helbig, & Ojo, 2014). The key argument is that cities
must be responsive to the changing context within which they operate, especially when that context
is offering significantly improved capability or efficiency (Cosgrave, Doody, & Walt, 2014). While
the discourse originally focused on universal patterns, the role of context is increasingly emphasized
(e.g., Meijer, 2015): What should be considered as ‘‘smart’’ depends on various contextual condi-
tions such as political system, geographical situation, and technology diffusion. According to the
European Parliament (2014), different patterns of actor roles and relations, policy instruments, and
implementation methods have been used by European smart cities. Smart solutions cannot be simply
copied but need to be assessed on their value for different contexts and translated to fit other
conditions. The role of context has been highlighted, but our knowledge about the relation between
context and approaches to smart cities is underdeveloped and requires a more sophisticated
understanding.
Many of the challenges faced by smart cities surpass the capacities, capabilities, and reaches of
their traditional institutions and their classical processes of governing, and therefore require new and
innovative forms of governance (Rodrı́guez, 2015). These new and innovative forms of governance
have been included into the term ‘‘smart governance’’ under which the government manages and
implements policies toward the improvement in quality of life of citizens by leveraging ICTs and
institutions and by actively involving and collaborating with stakeholders (Bertot, Jaeger, & Grimes,
2012; Gil-Garcia, 2012). Indeed, the current debate about smart governance is rather confusing
(Meijer & Rodrı́guez, 2013). Many questions remain concerning issues such as government leader-
ship, participative models of governance, and the collaborative structures needed to foster smart city
development, and research is needed to provide answers to these questions about governance models
for smart cities.
A third issue that requires a better understanding is the outcome of smart cities: public value. All
the smart city frameworks that have been suggested in the literature acknowledge that smart cities
are multidimensional systems, and even the frameworks more focused on a particular dimension do
not fail to acknowledge the importance of the other dimensions as well (Gil-Garcia, Pardo, & Nam,
2015; Meijer & Rodrı́guez, 2013). Nonetheless, all of them seem to highlight the creation of public
value as the main outcome of smart cities, directly or indirectly through business models that involve
public actors (Walravens & Ballon, 2013). More research is necessary to deal with the definition and
measurement of public value within the context of smart cities.
This introductory article is organized into five sections, including the foregoing introduction.
Section 2 builds upon this introduction and presents three unsolved questions in smart city research.
Section 3 describes the set of papers in this special issue and analyzes them in terms of answers to the
questions about contextual conditions, governance models, and public value. Finally, Section 4 pro-
vides some concluding remarks about smart city research and practice and suggests areas for future
research in this topic. We conclude that the papers generate confusion at a higher level, and we iden-
tify the need for more research to understand smart city governance in context.

Smart Cities: Some Unsolved Research Questions

In general terms, smart cities involve the creation of new relations between technology and society.
As noted previously, an extensive array of literature has been addressed to define the smart city con-
cept. Despite this literature, there is still not a clear and consistent understanding of the concept
among practitioners and academia because different perspectives have been taken from different
fields of knowledge to achieve this aim (e.g., e-government, information science, urban studies,
and public administration; Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; Tranos & Gertner, 2012). Indeed,

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Meijer et al. 3

an in-depth analysis of the literature reveals that the meaning of a smart city is multifaceted (Albino,
Berardi, & Dangelico, 2015; Gil-Garcia et al., 2015; Meijer & Rodrı́guez, 2013).
Although the concept of smart cities remains vague, it has a great deal of potential in framing
some particular challenges cities face today and provides new ways of thinking about potential
future issues (Walravens & Ballon, 2013). One main challenge is to analyze the conditions that can
make a city to become smart (Allwinkle & Cruickshank, 2011; Gil-Garcia et al., 2014). Although
there is no one route to becoming smart, and different cities have adopted different approaches that
reflect their particular circumstances, three general principles seem to guide smart city agendas.
These principles have included the integration with economic development and public service
delivery plans; the pragmatic focus with the bulk of investment going on projects that are practi-
cal, achievable, and financially viable; and, finally, the participation of community representa-
tives, local businesses, and residents to ensure projects is relevant to the city’s opportunities
and challenges (Centre for Cities, 2014). However, little is actually known about the more funda-
mental conditions underlying the smart city as a model. Therefore, a first question unsolved in the
smart city literature is:

Research Question 1: How do external conditions influence smart city governance?

In addition, the vagueness of the concept of smart cities and the difficulty in its consistency has
led some authors to propose some dimensions (Giffinger et al., 2007) as well as elements that char-
acterize a smart city, which emerged from the analysis of the existing literature (Albino et al., 2015;
Gil-Garcia et al., 2015).
According to Hollands (2013), the real smart city has to begin to think with its collective social
and political brain, rather than through its ‘‘technological tools.’’ It puts on the forefront the question
of collective action of different actors in creating the smart city (European Parliament, 2014) and the
possible government leadership for good governance under this framework (Lam, 2005; Mooij,
2003).
To date, smart city modes of urban governance have clearly been shaped and steered by large and
influential commercial players in the hardware, software, and infrastructure sectors, such as IBM,
General Electric, Cisco Systems, Hitachi, and Siemens, among others (Frost & Sullivan, 2013;
Hitachi, 2013; IBM Global Services, 2011; Siemens AG, 2011; Townsend, 2013). However, a main
element of a smart city is the smart government (Gil-Garcia, 2012; Scholl & Scholl, 2014) and the
role played by governments in these cities seems to be essential (Rodrı́guez, 2015).
In this regard, some authors indicate that smart governance is about making the right policy
choices and implementing these in an effective and efficient manner but, in this perspective, this can
be done within the existing administrative structures (Batty et al., 2012). Others point out that city
administrators should not aim to solve all problems in the city but rather that they strengthen the
capacity of urban systems to tackle a wide variety of problems (Caragliu, Del Bo, & Nijkamp,
2011). City governments become, this way, inactive participants within the ecosystem of stake-
holders and play a key role in connecting organizations across the city that have common goals and
complementary skills (Cosgrave et al., 2014).
On the other hand, smart city research has typically been focused on how governments might
improve urban economies, quality of life, and myriad problems by employing an often technodeter-
ministic outlook on the uses of ICTs (Sadoway & Shekhar, 2014). In this context, looking at smart
cities as the places where the concentration and interconnection of ‘‘big data’’ in cities lies, Kitchin
(2014) raises questions of technocratic governance, corporatization of city governance or vulnerabil-
ity, and surveillance.
Finally, some prior research affirms the central role of citizens both in the decision-making pro-
cess (in terms of codesign and codecision) and in the implementation of smart city initiatives, giving

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4 Social Science Computer Review

Table 1. Smart City: Key Unsolved Research Questions.

Input Process Outputs

Problem to be Physical, social, and institutional Governance of smart Outcomes of smart cities in
faced conditions of smart cities cities terms of public value
Unsolved research Relation between conditions Nature of Assessment of public value
Questions and governance governance models

them the ultimate decision in the adoption of the city’s services and the creation and management of
public value out of them (in terms of value cocreation and coevaluation; Castelnovo et al., 2015).
A systematic understanding of the nature of the governance models used in smart cities is lacking.
Therefore, the second unsolved research question is:

Research Question 2: How should we understand the governance models of smart cities?

Finally, prior research suggests that the main outcome of smart cities is the production of a wide
range of public value through innovative collaborations (Meijer & Rodrı́guez, 2013). According to
Stoker (2006), local administration becomes the main actor in the process of creating public value
but not the only one (Alford & Hughes, 2008). The components of public value can be identified not
only in a tangible dimension but also, and above all, from an intangible dimension (Bounfour &
Edvinson, 2012; Bounfour, 2013). In general, the creation of public value means to have a vision
for a better future in a variety of different forms, which has been included in several definitions
of smart cities (Gil-Garcia et al., 2015).
In this regard, into the smart cities framework, some authors indicate that the creation of pub-
lic value must be split into two different approaches: the financial architecture and the value pro-
position approaches (Walravens & Ballon, 2013). The first one (financial architecture) is related
to the financial return of public actions, whereas the second approach (value proposition) exam-
ines public value from the perspective of the end user and refers to the justification a government
provides in taking the initiative to deliver a specific service, rather than leaving its deployment
to the market.
In any case, the core of this parameter is the question of whether or not an evaluation of the public
value generated is performed (Walravens & Ballon, 2013). Since the public value has a consumer
approach (Moore, 1995), it is the needs and wants of the collective citizenry that should count in
this evaluation (Alford & Hughes, 2008). Therefore, it is expected that future research be focused
on models for evaluating performance and the generation of public value within smart cities. Thus,
the last unsolved research question is:

Research Question 3: How can the performance of smart city governance be assessed in
terms of public value?

Table 1 summarizes three key unsolved research questions on smart cities. In summary, smart
city initiatives are a response to the challenges that cities face when attempting to meet myriad
objectives regarding socioeconomic development and quality of life (Schaffers et al., 2011). In this
regard, there is an increasing need to develop new ways of looking at the city of the future and think
about structured approaches to provide answers to the diverse and complex questions companies,
citizens, and governments face there. Nonetheless, as mentioned before, some important research
questions from the perspective of public management remain unsolved.

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Meijer et al. 5

Table 2. Overview of the Papers in This Special Issue.

Authors Research Approach Empirical Research Focus

Caragliu and Del Bo Quantitative research European cities

Chatfield and Reddick Qualitative research Kitakyushu City (Japan)
Rodrı́guez and Meijer Theoretical and quantitative research European cities
Dameri and Benevolo Quantitative research Italian cities
Van Waart, Mulder, and De Bont Qualitative research Rotterdam (the Netherlands)
Castelnovo, Misuraca, and Salvodelli Theoretical —
Boukhris et al. Qualitative research La Marsa (Tunesia)

New Insights Into Contextual Conditions, Governance Models,

and Public Value
This special issue presents a set of papers that are varied both in research approach and in focus. The
special issue presents a mix of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative research. In addition, it pre-
sents empirical studies from Africa, Europe, and Asia. This collection of paper presents a rich var-
iation in empirical and theoretical insights that help to advance our academic understanding of smart
cities (see Table 2). More specifically, the papers provide some interesting answers into the three
unresolved research questions previously identified.

Contextual Conditions
The importance of context is increasingly stressed in publications on smart cities but a systematic
analysis of the role of context is rare.

 The paper by Caragliu and Del Bo in this special issue addresses this question and provides
some highly interesting insights as to the role of context. Their first key finding is that smart
city policies are more likely to be designed and implemented in cities that are already
endowed with smart characteristics. Their second finding is that smart city policies are
more likely to be implemented in denser and wealthier urban areas. This finding counters
the idea that a smart city policy may be used by cities to make a leap forward and confirms
the Matthew effect that ‘‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’’ The context for smart
city policies is much more favorable in cities that are already smart and wealthy. At the
same time, the paper also generates some hope for other cities since the authors suggest that
the smart city model can be viewed as a model of urban development with different cities at
different points along the path. So, almost every city could be seen as having certain degree
of smartness.

Governance Models
Many publications in this special issue advance our understanding of governance models for smart
cities and much attention is paid to citizen participation and bottom-up innovation.

 While the literature sometimes puts an emphasis on structures and policies, Chatfield and
Reddick highlight the importance of a shared vision and adaptive use of informal social gov-
ernance mechanisms. Based on an empirical study of the Japanese city Kitakyushu, citizen-
centric e-governance, a leadership network based on resource dependence and cross-sectoral
collaboration based on social embeddedness are found to be central to these informal govern-
ance mechanisms for the implementation of the smart city.

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6 Social Science Computer Review

 Rodrı´guez and Meijer conducted a literature review and a survey among smart city practi-
tioners in Europe to develop a model and their model encompasses many similar arguments.
They add, however, that a vision by itself does not suffice and actions in terms of legislation,
policy, and organizational transformation are also needed. In addition, they highlight the
importance of building an innovation capacity for the city.
 Dameri and Benevolo conducted a survey among Italian cities and concluded that political
involvement in smart city projects and policies is limited. They highlight that this involve-
ment is important to embed smart city development in democratic institutions but, possibly
for a lack of knowledge and a technocratic framing of the issue, political attention for smart
city development is limited.
 Van Waart, Mulder, and De Bont analyzed the Dutch city of Rotterdam and highlight the
desired interplay between top-down and bottom-up approaches. They conclude that the multi-
level perspective described in transition management studies is crucial to our understanding
of these dynamics of smart cities. They conclude that embracing the (vertical and horizontal)
networking element may be crucial to the practice of cocreative future city making.
 Boukhris, Ayachi, Elouedi, Mellouli, and Amor take us to a more specific analysis of smart
city governance, as they develop a tool based on Multi-Criteria Decision Making to provide
decision makers with the best alternative(s) that are based on citizens’ opinions. They con-
clude that the tool that they have developed allows involving citizens in a transparent manner
in government decision making.

Assessing Public Value

The question of performance—when does a smart city do well?—is often not answered explicitly,
but this issue contains two papers that provide some important insights.

 Rodrı´guez and Meijer make a distinction between first-, second-, and third-order outcomes of
smart governance. First-order outcomes are changes to the government organization such as
efficient government and readiness for disaster management. Second-order outcomes entail
changes in the position of government vis-à-vis other urban actors such as citizen-centric ser-
vices and interactions with citizens. Third-order outcomes are improvements to the city such
as economic growth, social inclusion, ecological performance, and highly educated citizens.
 Castelnovo, Misuraca, and Savoldelli highlight the need for a holistic approach to the assess-
ment of smart city governance. They develop a performance assessment framework that
consists of five dimensions: community building and management, vision and strategy for-
mulation, public value generation, asset management, and economic and financial sustain-
ability. They highlight that four perspectives from which smart city governance can be
measured can be identified at the intersections of these dimensions.

Although their foci differ, the models that Rodrı́guez and Meijer and Castelnovo, Misuraca, and
Savoldelli developed both stress that the assessment of smart city governance is a multidimensional
and coupled endeavor that should focus on the relations between organizational and governmental
change and overall outcomes in terms of economic and financial sustainability, which is clearly
related to the generation of public value. Together, the articles provide important insights and initial
answers to the questions proposed at the beginning of this article.

Concluding Remarks
This special issue rejects the idea of a one-best approach to smart cities and replaces it by an empha-
sis on differences in contextual conditions, governance models, and public value assessments. The

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Meijer et al. 7

papers highlight that cities cannot simply copy good practices but must develop approaches that fit
their own situation (contingency) and concord with their own organization in terms of broader stra-
tegies, human resource policies, information policies, and so on (configuration). A smart city out of
a box is not an option that is supported by current research and the papers in this special issue make
this point very clear.
At the same time, this collection of papers provides insights in the mechanisms and building
blocks of smart city practices. We would like to highlight the following lessons that we can draw
from the papers:

 Multilevel smart city governance. Building a smart city requires actions at different levels in
municipal organizations and in the social fabric of the city. Grand visions in city hall need to
go hand in hand with practices in local neighborhoods. The fit between the variety of (bottom
up) initiatives and the overarching (city wide) strategy is a key challenge for all cities.
 Sociotechnical smart city governance. Building a smart city requires a reinforcing dynamic
between human collaboration and technological systems. This is the challenge of creating
‘‘synergy’’ between the social organization and the technological backbone. The nature of the
synergy depends on the context and a fitting governance model is needed to produce this
synergy.
 Smart city governance for diverse public value. Realizing a smart city is not only about bring-
ing environmental sustainability to cities but about acknowledging that a city realizes a
diverse set of public values. As a consequence, efforts to improve urban governance with new
technologies should aim to contribute to this variety and embrace the political nature of socio-
technological choices. Generating public value within a smart city strategy could mean many
things depending on the specific context and problem to be solved.

How these challenges are dealt with depends on contextual conditions, results in specific govern-
ance models, and ends, hopefully, with the production of a diversity of public value.
This special issue has probably resulted in more new questions than in answers to the many ques-
tions about smart city governance and hence there is a great need for more specific analyses of smart
city governance in context. These questions that have been identified, however, take the debate
about smart cities from a universal, prescriptive—maybe even idealistic—level to the local, descrip-
tive, and pragmatic level. Feldman and Orlikowski (2011) would emphasize that we need a practice
lens to understand smart cities. The papers in this special issue help to construct this practice lens and
to generate nuanced insights that require a local translation to construct contingent smart cities.

Authors’ Note
The views and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council or their home institutions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: This research was partially funded by the Regional Government of Andalusia (Spain),
Department of Innovation, Science and Enterprise (Research project number P11-SEJ-7700). This article was
also partially supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada enti-
tled ‘‘Smart Cities and Service Integration.’’

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8 Social Science Computer Review

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Author Biographies
Albert J. Meijer is a professor of public innovation at the Utrecht School of Governance in the Netherlands.
His research focuses on innovation, transparency, coproduction and social media. He is the lead investigator of
an international comparative research project on smarty cities in Brazil, Scotland, and the Netherlands and the
principal investigator at Utrecht University for a large European research project into open data. Email:
[email protected]
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia is an associate professor of public administration and policy and the research director
of the center for technology in government, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY).
Dr. Gil-Garcia is a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers and of the Mexican Academy
of Sciences. In 2009, he was considered the most prolific author in the field of digital government research
worldwide and in 2013 he was selected for the Research Award, which is ‘‘the highest distinction given annu-
ally by the Mexican Academy of Sciences to outstanding young researchers.’’ Currently, he is a Faculty

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10 Social Science Computer Review

Affiliate at the National Center for Digital Government, University of Massachusetts Amherst and also an
Affiliated Faculty member of the Informatics Doctorate Program at the College of Engineering and Applies
Sciences, University at Albany. He is also a Professor (on leave) in the Department of Public Administration
at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. Dr. Gil-Garcia is the author or co-
author of articles in prestigious international journals in Public Administration, Information Systems, and Digi-
tal Government and some of his publications are among the most cited in the field of digital government
research worldwide. His research interests include collaborative electronic government, inter-organizational
information integration, smart cities and smart governments, adoption and implementation of emergent tech-
nologies, information technologies and organizations, digital divide policies, new public management, and
multi-method research approaches. Email: [email protected]
Manuel Pedro Rodrı́guez Bolı́var is a professor in accounting at the University of Granada. His research inter-
ests are focused on e-government and smart cities. He is the lead investigator of a research project on
e-government in Spain. He has authored numerous articles in JCR journals and several book chapters published
in Kluwer Academic Publishers, Springer, Taylor and Francis, and IGI Global and is editor of several interna-
tional journals and books. He is a member of the Department of Accounting and Finance, Faculty of Business
Studies, University of Granada, Spain. Email: [email protected]

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