Scope

Digitization, and its underlying technologies, emerged as a most valuable asset for cities to become ‘smart’, i.e. able to manage efficiently and creatively their resources, improve the quality of life, promote effective citizenship, and address development, sustainability and inclusion challenges.

Going smart, however, affects governance models and practices in more than one dimension.

On the one hand, many of the challenges faced by smart cities surpass the capabilities and reaches of their traditional institutions and classical management principles. They entail the need for harnessing the power of social and technological innovation to transform the city’s governance processes, models, instances and practices.

On the other hand, digital transformation itself is re-shaping urban governance, often in a disruptive way. For example, a whole range of new possibilities is now open for more transparent and participatory administrative processes, co-creation of public services, evidence-based decision making, automatically certified procedures and democratically accountable institutional practices. Simultaneously, new concerns are raised, namely with respect to privacy and security issues, the resilience of critical information infrastructures, the articulation of multiple social expectations and behaviours, the assessing and smart monitoring of public policies. Finally, granular, pervasive, real-time data, as well as the raise of AI, deep learning and of new information and computation paradigms, bring new insights into urban behavioural patterns, infrastructural dynamics and their articulation in the public urban space.

In such a context, this conference focus on all aspects of urban smart governance, broadly understood as the intelligent use of digitization and their technologies (e.g. data-driven, cognitive, cyber-physical, etc.) in planning, managing, transforming and monitoring cities’ governance instances and improving decision-making through enhanced collaboration among different stakeholders. Contributions are sought with respect to smart governance foundations, models, frameworks, practices, components, dynamics, challenges and trade-offs. Submissions introducing experience reports, lessons learned, comparative studies and case analyses are also most welcome.

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Topics

Submissions are invited in all aspects and dimensions of smart governance, and their role in the project, design, implementation and monitoring of smart cities, including, but not restricted to:

Smart governance foundations, models, frameworks and principles.
Smart governance practices, dynamics, challenges, potential pitfalls and trade-offs.
Administrative efficiency and burden reduction.
Alignment of city policies with social and environmental sustainability goals.
Smart governance-related case-studies and experience reports.
Citizen centricity and citizen driven solutions for smart cities.
Context-aware service delivery.
Co-production and collaborative forms of service design and delivery.
Data and evidence-based policymaking.
Formal models for governance workflows and processes.
Generic and modular urban governance solutions.
Harnessing ICT for urban governance.
Impact of emerging technologies (e.g. AI, machine learning, blockchain, sensor networks, ITS – intelligent transportation systems).
Interoperability and once-only platforms.
Legal and normative dimensions.
Management of urban innovation.
Innovation and new business models.
Open governance and accountability.
Participatory decision making.
Challenges on privacy and security.
Public/private/social partnerships.
Governance of transformation processes.
Specific urban governance challenges (e.g. smart mobility, culture, tourism)
Social media and urban awareness.
Sustainability
Urban big data from heterogeneous sources.

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Publication

All registered papers will be published by Springer and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library.

Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion in leading indexing services, Ei Compendex, ISI Web of Science, Scopus, CrossRef, Google Scholar, DBLP, as well as EAI’s own EU Digital Library (EUDL).

Additionally, selected papers will be considered to be included in one of EAI Transactions:

- EAI Transactions series (Open Access)