Smart Governance: A Cross-case Analysis of Smart City Initiatives

City governments around the world have embarked on smart-city initiatives and projects with the aim of creating a future-ready urban environment, in which critical infrastructure components and online services are intelligent, efficient, and highly interconnected. Reshaping administrative structures and processes across multiple local government agencies and departments appears as an important prerequisite to success in these initiatives. Moreover, the model of governance in such multi-agency initiatives is key to achieving desired outcomes and sustainability. Such "smart" governance is viewed as foundational to creating smart cities. This study investigates and documents the governance models that emerged in four recent smart city initiatives (Seattle/USA, eCityGov Alliance/USA, Munich/Germany, and Turin/Italy). The findings indicate that governance models vary from one case to another depending on a number of factors. Furthermore, despite notable similarities decision-making processes differed across the cases, and each case exhibits specific methods of conflict resolution. However, stakeholder involvement in governance was found fundamental across all cases.