Urenio Watch Watch: Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities

Smart cities as large technological systems: Overcoming organizational challenges in smart cities through collective action

This study is researching the non-technological dimensions of smart cities. By reviewing the activities in 8 smart cities from a perspective of large technological systems, the authors argue that many of the challenges and solutions are organizational in nature. Continue reading

Application Programming Interfaces in Governments: Why, what and how

This report presents the results of the European Commission application programming interfaces (APIs) for digital government (APIs4DGov) study, which aims to analyse the role of APIs in the public sector and, specifically, the motivations for their use and the way governments should implement them.  This document provides a concrete tool for governments to determine the status of their API strategies and, eventually, how these strategies should be designed or adopted.

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New Book: Democratizing Our Data

In the book “Democratizing our Data: A Manifesto” Julia Lane discusses the topic of data democratisation in the context of the US, legislations that could support it and successful paradigms that can be followed. The book is a call to rethink the way that US collects and analyzes public data, in order to improve privacy, equity and the implementation of policy initiatives. Continue reading

New report on Citizen-led data governance

The rise of the online economy is based on the opportunities to extract value from data that is produced by digital technologies. As opposed to data brokers that gain value buying and selling personal information, this report argues for radically new ideas about how the value of our personal information can be returned back to citizens. Rather than focusing on how making money from data, it focuses on how data can benefit society as a whole, exploring the idea of ‘data commons’. The report is entitled “Common Knowledge: Citizen-led data governance for better cities” and is part of the decode H2020 project.

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Redefining the Smart City: Culture, Metabolism and Governance

redefining smart citiesThis paper reviews the literature about the Smart City paradigm in terms of culture, metabolism and governance and proposes a theoretical framework around it. This framework adopts a citizen-centered and outcome-oriented approach rather than a technology-based, corporate-driven solution. This approach applies smart infrastructure to each of the three fundamental values of a city in order to show how smart culture, smart metabolism, and smart governance can be created.

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Book Chapter: Co-producing Smart City Services

This chapter provides theoretical empirical information regarding methods and tools that can make co-production of public services a   more efficient process. Through an exploration of six pilot case studies, authors find out that, apart from methods and tools, other skills as well as the capacity to manage the governance of co-production are crucial for this objective.

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