Page 25 - Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

2.2 Governance and Smart Cities

Smart cities demand continuous adaptation and local innovation governance, with new modern
organizational and management structures, and new decision-making models based on openness,
transparency, control, and effective accountability. It can only be achieved by providing an effective
increase in the efficiency of public services, which will improve people’s quality of life, and the
optimum use of available resources without prejudice to the urban environment.

Actual participatory governance and sustainable intelligence in urban management change the
very basal conceptions of its object and mission. The city is an articulated “system” or “network”
of attention, regulation, provision of services, and the public service as a cooperative, open, and
responsible action. And all this in an environment that is globally sustainable and technically
advanced.

The open and relational Administration can “act” through the authentic articulation of interests in
presence but from a necessary and adapted regulatory framework of guarantee. This integrated,
global, and cooperative management of public interests (objectives) is presented, therefore, as a
“process” in the improvement (in quality, efficiency, and usefulness) of the ways of acting and the
temporary innovation of the same, a process (of constant improvement) of institutionalized and
material nature.

In these objectives, the use of modern information, communication and interrelation technologies is
presented as inescapable from the very framework of interoperability between the different urban
subsystems. The digitalisation and virtualisation of public administrative action must pursue not
only “the end of paper” but the authentic accessibility, knowledge and participation of citizens in
it, with actions that solve problems and anticipate needs, so generating public value.

Public value could be categorized according to three categories of operational value, political
value, and social value (see Figure 1). This framework is largely drawn from Chu and Tseng’s (2018)
3
“Open Data in Support of E-governance Evaluation: A Public Value Framework” and has been
supplemented with additional values from research as Osborne, S. P., Nasi, G., & Powell, M. (2021). 4

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