Smart Cities Governance: the need for a holistic approach to assessing urban participatory policy making

Most of the definitions of 'smart city' make a direct or indirect reference to the improvement of city performance as one of the main objectives of initiatives which aim to make cities 'smarter'. Several evaluation approaches and models have been advanced in literature and practice to measure smart cities. However, they are often normative or limited to certain aspects of cities' 'smartness', and a more comprehensive and holistic approach seems to be missing. Thus, building on a review of the literature and practice in the field, this paper aims to discuss the importance of adopting a holistic approach to the assessment of smart city governance and policy decision-making. It also proposes a performance assessment framework that overcomes the limitations of existing approaches and contributes to filling the current gap in the knowledge base in this domain. One of the innovative elements of the proposed framework is its holistic approach to policy evaluation. It is designed to address the smart city’s specificities and its capacity to benefit from the active participation of citizens in assessing the public value of policy decisions and their sustainability over time. In so doing, we focus our attention towards the performance measurement of multi-stakeholders co-design, co-production and social innovation processes related to public value generation. More specifically we are interested in the assessment of both the citizen-centricity of smart cities’ decision-making, and the processes by which public decisions are implemented, monitored and evaluated in relation to their capability to develop truly “blended” value services which are at the same time socially inclusive, environmental friendly and economical sustainable.JRC.J.3-Information Societ