Smart and Connected Cities and Communities

Description

Cities and communities around the world are entering a new era of transformation in which residents and their surrounding environments are increasingly connected through rapidly changing intelligent technologies, sometimes called, smart technologies. This transformation, which has become a top priority for many cities and other local governments, offers great promise for improved well-being and prosperity but, also, poses significant challenges at the complex intersection of technology and society.

A smart and connected community can be conceptualized as one that synergistically integrates intelligent technologies with the natural and built environments, including infrastructure, to improve the social, economic, and environmental well-being of those who live, work, or travel within it. Building on the notion of community informatics, smart communities can be seen as enabling and empowering citizens and supporting the individual and communal quests for well-being.

Although the literature is rich in references to smart cities and communities, this is still a developing and fuzzy concept due to its multidimensional and multifaceted aspect that goes beyond the mere use of technology and infrastructure. Although technology is a necessary condition to become smart, it is not the only aspect that defines smart cities and communities. Novel studies are indicating that emerging technologies have a huge influence on social life, catalyzing new needs of citizens and transforming the way they are addressed, influencing people’s ability to exercise their “right to the city/community” and impacting on social sustainability on several levels. City administration and community management, information integration, data quality, privacy and security, institutional arrangements, and citizen participation are therefore some of the issues that need greater attention to make a community smarter today and in the near future.

Nonetheless, the literature on smart cities and communities is fragmented, particularly in terms of the strategies that different cities and communities should follow in order to become smarter. What most of the literature does agree on is that there is no single way to becoming smart and different communities have adopted different approaches that reflect their particularities. In addition, the advent of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, open government, open data, big data, blockchain, chatbots and so on, have opened new avenues for smart governance in the urban and communities’ contexts, which fosters new research on this area.

This mini track aims at exploring these issues, paying particular attention to the challenges of smart cities and smart communities as well as to the impact of these initiatives to understand how new technologies can shape the social sustainability, the livability of local communities, and the wellbeing of its residents. It also focuses on the orchestrated interplay and balance of smart governance practices, smart public administration, smart communities, smart resources and talent leverage in urban, rural, and regional spaces facilitated by novel uses of ICT and other technologies.

As a result, areas of focus and interest to this mini track include, but are not limited, to the following topics:

• Taxonomies of smart cities and communities
• Smart governance as the foundation to creating smart urban and regional spaces (elements, prerequisites, and principles of smart governance)
• Smart cities and smart government (focal areas, current practices, cases, and potential pitfalls)
• Smart partnerships (triple/quadruple/quintuple helix, public-private partnerships, and citizen participation)
• The impact of digital transformation on the change of citizens’ role in the city
• Smart cities, communities and regions (cases, rankings, comparisons, and critical success factors)
• Benefits of the impact of emerging technologies on citizens and local communities
• Collective intelligence for smart cities and communities
• Emerging technologies in smart cities and communities (artificial intelligence, big data, open data, open government, social media and networks, chatbots, etc.)
• Smart governance in cities and communities in the age of the emerging technologies
• Management of smart cities and communities
• Outcomes of smart cities and communities
• The role of digital technologies in both increasing community livability and improving social sustainability and inequalities
• Smart services
• Urban-rural gaps in smart communities
• Resilience and sustainability capacities in smart cities and communities.
• Innovative solutions for smart cities and communities
• Building knowledge societies for smart cities and communities
• Smart cities and communities and their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Marketing plan

All digital government’s mini tracks call for papers are posted on the digital government track chair’s webpage. Additionally, the call for papers will be posted on several websites (such our organizations’). We will also send the call for papers to several digital government networks, send personal invitations to colleagues, and will use social media to disseminate it (in particular, Twitter and LinkedIn). 

Minitrack Leaders

Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar is full Professor at the University of Granada. His areas of research are mainly related to information and technology in government and, among other, they include electronic and open government, e-governance, public sector innovation, smart cities, and public policy evaluation. He has authored numerous articles in international journals, among them we can highlight Public Money & Management, Government Information Quarterly, Public Administration and Development, Online Information Review, International Review of Administrative Sciences, American Review of Public Administration, ABACUS, Academia. Revista Latinoamericana de Administración, International Public Management Journal, Environmental Education Research, INNOVAR, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, Electronic Commerce Research and Administration & Society. He has been also the author of several book chapters published in prestigious international publishers such as Kluwer Academic Publishers, Springer, Routledge, Palgrave, Taylor and Francis and IGI Global, and is author of full-length books published by the Ministry of Economy and Finance in Spain. In addition, he is Editor in Chief of IJPADA and member of the Editorial Board of Government Information Quarterly. He is also editor of other international journals and books.

Elsa Estevez is the chair holder of the UNESCO Chair on Knowledge Societies and Digital Governance at Universidad Nacional del Sur, an Independent Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), and Full Professor at the National University of La Plata, all in Argentina. She is also a consultant for Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on the matters of digital government, particularly in Latin America. Previously, she was a Senior Academic Program Officer and Academic Program Officer at the United Nations University (UNU) in Macao and Portugal; Visiting Professor at the National University of Rio Negro, Argentina; Gdansk University of Technology, Poland; University of Minho, Portugal; and head of Information Technology (IT) departments in large financial and pharmaceutical organizations in Argentina. She consulted for governments, taught to public managers and policy makers, and organized events about digital government in over 30, mostly developing countries. Her research interests cover the structuring of the information technology function in government, digital transformation of government-citizen relationships, and the impact of such transformation on nations' and cities' capacity to pursue sustainable development. She has a PhD in Computer Science from Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina.

Anna Domaradzka-Widla is a sociologist, Assistant Professor, and the Director at Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw (Poland). She currently serves as a board member of International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), and Research Committee 48 on Social Movements and Collective Action of International Sociological Association. At the moment, her main research focus is on civil society in the urban context, neighborhood associations, “right to the city” movement and social entrepreneurship in comparative perspective.

Gabriela Viale Pereira is Assistant Professor for Information Systems at the Department for E-Governance and Administration at Danube University Krems and Research Fellow at CTG UAlbany. She holds a Post-Doctoral Degree from the Center for Research on Public Administration and Government at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Brazil (2019) and a Doctoral Degree in Administration from the School of Business at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2016). She is Project Coordinator of the Erasmus+ Strengthening Governance Capacity for Smart Sustainable Cities (CAP4CITY) project. Gabriela’s activities include research in electronic government and ICT-related Governance projects involving smart governance, smart cities, open data, data analytics and government 3.0. Gabriela has authored and co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications on Information Systems and e-government. In addition, she has been working with a variety of organizations such as United Nations, ITU, and Council of Europe and she is a Board Member of the Digital Government Society (2022/2023) and IFIP WG 8.5 in ICT & Public Administration (2021-2023).