دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی شهروندی خلاق: موج جدیدی برای محیط های همکاری در شهرهای هوشمند - امرالد 2018

1. Introduction

Nowadays, city governments are increasingly facing complex socio-technical problems and in response have developed strategies that rely on sophisticated information technologies (ICTs) in creative and innovative ways (European Parliament, 2014; Centre for Cities, 2014). These strategies are mainly rooted in democratic theory and revolves around processes of deliberation and ongoing dialogue between institutions and the public they serve (Albert and Passmore, 2008). Indeed, the central spirit of smart cities is the need of building structures based on the negotiated involvement of multiple public and private stakeholders (Pinnegar et al., 2008; Preissl and Mueller, 2006) with the aim at creating public value. The emergence and relevance of these ideas regarding the creation of public value and the need of citizen involvement in smart cities introduces a substantial change in the management of the city and the need for creating new and innovative forms of governance based on the concept of network governance (Rodríguez Bolívar, 2017a). Civic participation is a main way of transforming government to make it open and closer to the citizenry needs and it has been told to be a main objective within the context of smart cities and the smart cities movement (Rodríguez Bolívar, 2016). According to European Parliament (2014), active participation of citizenry in smart cities is necessary to create a sense of ownership and commitment, local level coordination to ensure the integration of solutions across the portfolio of initiatives and participation of local governments in networks to share knowledge and experiences. In brief, smart cities have really become in relational networks of actors, and the interaction among these urban actors constitutes urban governance. It highlights the process of coordinating and steering the urban society toward collectively defined goals (Pierre, 2005).

5. Discussions and conclusions

This research explores the perception of smart practitioners about collaborative governance models as well as the examination of e-participation trends among smart cities included into the group of “creative citizenship” of EUROCITIES network in the two main aspects of the Open Government development process: transparency and active participation. A main limitation of our research is the limited number of responses (34,04% as the minimum response rate). Thus, our findings must be interpreted taking into account the level of responses obtained. In this regard, future research should increase the number of responses to the questionnaire to obtain richer data with the aim at undertaking wider analysis of the issue analysed. Nonetheless, as it has been demonstrated in prior research, the methodology of research used in this paper with the level of response rate achieved provides valid and robust results, and it is the normal level of response rate for online surveys (Nulty, 2008). Also, urban regimes are likely to emerge in a different way in different contexts. In fact, most theories of urban politics fail to properly conceptualize or explain patterns of urban governance because they are focused only on single-case studies (Pierre, 2005). So, findings of this research could be the result of the political, economic, and institutional context of each one of the sample cities members of EUROCITIES network. Future research could analyse e-participation models from a structured and focused comparative lens, with the aim at obtaining more analytical mileage (Pierre, 2005). In any case, this issue does not invalidate results obtained but it reflects the context in which the results are obtained.