AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
DOI 10.1007/s00146-013-0464-0
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Smart cities in the new service economy: building platforms
for smart services
Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko • Pekka Valkama •
Stephen J. Bailey
Received: 15 October 2012 / Accepted: 23 April 2013 / Published online: 22 June 2013
 Springer-Verlag London 2013
Abstract Recent changes in service environments have
changed the preconditions of their production and con-
sumption. These changes include unbundling services from
production processes, growth of the information-rich
economy and society, the search for creativity in service
production and consumption and continuing growth of
digital technologies. These contextual changes affect city
governments because they provide a range of infrastructure
and welfare services to citizens. Concepts such as ‘smart
city’, ‘intelligent city’ and ‘knowledge city’ build new
horizons for cities in undertaking their challenging service
functions in an increasingly cost-conscious, competitive
and environmentally oriented setting. What is essential in
practically all of them is that they paint a picture of cities
with smooth information processes, facilitation of creativ-
ity and innovativeness, and smart and sustainable solutions
promoted through service platforms. This article discusses
this topic, starting from the nature of services and the new
service economy as the context of smart local public ser-
vices. On this basis, we build an overall framework for
understanding the basic forms and dimensions of smart
public services. The focus is on conceptual systematisation
of the key dimensions of smart services and the conceptual
modelling of smart service platforms through which digital
technology is increasingly embedded in social creativity.
A.-V. Anttiroiko (&)
P. Valkama
S. J. Bailey
School of Management, University of Tampere,
Tampere, Finland
e-mail: kuaran@uta.fi
P. Valkama
e-mail: pekka.valkama@uta.fi
S. J. Bailey
e-mail: S.J.Bailey@gcu.ac.uk
We provide examples of real-life smart service applications
within the European context.
Keywords Smart city
Smartness
Service economy

Service platform
e-Platform
Platform governance

Sustainability
Social inclusion
1 Introduction
A range of contextual changes of public administration,
such as unbundling services from production processes
(‘servicisation’), growth of the information-rich economy
and society (‘informatisation’), the search for creativity in
service production and consumption (‘creativisation’), and
continuing growth of digital technologies (‘digitalisation’),
have changed the preconditions of public service produc-
tion and consumption. These changes affect among others
city governments, which have a responsibility to provide a
range of infrastructure and welfare services to citizens.
There is a wide variety of city conceptions that have built a
new horizon for cities in their challenging tasks in an
increasingly cost-consciousness, competitive and environ-
mentally oriented setting. Irrespective of whether the
concept is smart city, intelligent city, sustainable city,
knowledge city, creative city, innovative city, ubiquitous
city, digital city or city 2.0 (e.g. Komninos 2002; Aurigi
2005; Carillo 2006; Hollands 2008, 305), they all paint a
picture of a modern city with smooth information pro-
cesses, facilitation mechanisms for creativity and innova-
tiveness, and smart and sustainable service solutions and
platforms. Such features of envisioned new urban gover-
nance imply profound changes in the production, delivery
and consumption of local public services.
Smart service solutions have been discussed from vari-
ous points of view. Since the late 1990s, the key issue was
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digitalisation, which was discussed under the label ‘smart
communities’ (Caves and Walshok 1997; Caves 2004) and
later also ‘intelligent cities’ (Komakech 2005; Komninos
2002) and ‘knowledge cities’ (Carillo 2006). This discus-
sion is relevant to practically all aspects of local govern-
ment, including service provision, democratic processes,
city planning and development policy.
A new dimension to smart city discourse emerged in the
wake of environmental concerns, especially since the late
1980s. Almost three-quarters of the world’s population are
projected to live in urban areas by 2050 (UN 2011). This
will create very substantial and highly complex human,
societal, scientific and environmental issues, including how
people live, travel around cities and receive services. The
need to utilise technologies to provide information and
facilitate community developments and social cohesion
within increasingly intensive urban environments is
increasingly apparent. Even if the sustainability agenda is
global, and has been primarily addressed within the EU at
both the community and national levels, local and regional
governments have also become active advocates of sus-
tainable development. The hoped-for result is clean air and
a higher quality of life as member states and their local and
regional governments respond to these policy challenges,
some city governments having already developed such
initiatives (Edwards 2011; Schaffers et al. 2011, 434–435;
Hollands 2008, 303–305). Furthermore, the idea of ‘crea-
tive city’ has also been linked with a broader progressive
agenda, including aspects of sustainability and social
inclusion (Sasaki 2003).
This article develops the idea of smart public services,
starting from the nature of services in the new service
economy as a context for present-day city governments.
The focus is on conceptual systematisation of the key
dimensions of smart cities and their service functions and
on building a conceptual model for smart service platforms.
From this perspective, the aim is to provide examples of
real-life smart service applications from the European
context. Essentially, the article will provide comprehensive
framework for understanding the basic forms and dimen-
sions of smart service platforms and applications. The
social dimension of smart city as a precondition for the
accurate understanding of what smartness means in public
domain beyond instrumentality will also be analysed.
2 The changing role of cities in the new service
economy
Urban governments have been engaged by increasingly
radical economic transformation as heavy industries and
manufacturing were progressively replaced by service
industries (in proportionate and absolute terms), for
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AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
example, retailing, education, welfare and business, and
financial services.
The emergence and dominance of service sectors in
cities has been quite controversial because many service
industries are characterised by low-paid low-skilled man-
ual jobs. This reflects low productivity of those workers,
wages and salaries tending to reflect productivity, espe-
cially in the private sector.
New trends in services have started to change the overall
picture. First, some services can be formalised, codified
and modularised by information and communication tech-
nologies (ICTs) and so become more footloose and easily
tradable because global communication and delivery costs
are very low through the Internet. An increasing proportion
of formerly local services can be redefined as global ser-
vice products and manual services can be digitised and
automated. (Kushida and Zysman 2009; Jorgenson and
Wessner 2007, 276; Rutherford 2002, 393; Zysman 2004,
16–18).
Second, development of the ‘network economy’ creates
new models for cooperation in production, delivery and
consumption of services. On the one hand, service enter-
prises and other service providers can establish different
kind of alliances or consortiums through electronic net-
works in order to circulate knowledge, share risks and
extend and reformulate value chains. On the other hand,
consumer electronic networks funnel consumer instruc-
tions, expectations and understandings, creating opportu-
nities for shared service experiences (de Man 2004, 4;
Bessant and Tidd 2007, 85; Furubotn and Richter 2005,
308–310).
Third, liberalisation of many service industries breaks
up monopoly power and so creates greater competitive
pressures to be cost-effective and innovative in (re)con-
figuring services (Bailey 2002; see also Bailey 2001;
Valkama et al. 2012).
These perspectives of the new service economy create
both opportunities and challenges for urban governments.
Challenges include how to integrate physical products and
devices with services and how to ‘unbundle’ manual and
silo-based service packages into digitised and integrated
service systems. Also, the perception of value creation has
changed in the sense that service providers are not con-
ceived as the only parties that deliver value for customers.
Rather, customers have a vital role in the value-creation
process as users who create added value in the consump-
tion process. Client behaviour and producer–client rela-
tionships are crucial in order to understand the value-in-use
and value-in-context arising from services. In this per-
spective, value-in-exchange applied to physical outputs is
too limited a framework to fully understand service con-
sumption and processes because value can continue to be
added to the outcome after the exchange of service.
AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
In the current discussion about services, a third con-
textual element is added to the picture besides producers
and customers: the service system. This means that in the
new service economy, values are co-created jointly not
purely by service providers and customers but also within
the context of a wider service system made up of inter-
mediaries and other stakeholders. These conceptions put
the division of labour and patterns of interaction between
the public and private sectors into a new perspective (Paton
and McLaughlin 2008, 79; Vargo et al. 2008; Tien 2007,
66–67; Gallaher et al. 2006, 7–11, 117).
The process of urban economic growth is therefore not
simply one of scaling-up existing activities and structures
to achieve economies of scale and (perhaps) scope. Instead,
it involves endogenous and creative–destructive economic
and social evolution processes via organisational innova-
tion. The prerequisite of productivity improvements in
urban services is increased flexibility of both service pro-
duction and consumption. This is a vital framing element in
the efforts to build smart services that have multifunctional
and synergistic natures as a one of the most important set of
activities that is supposed to increase our well-being at
individual and collective levels.
3 Smart city: ICTs in a multi-layered setting
The smart city concept reflects a particular idea of local
community, one where city governments, enterprises and
residents use ICTs to reinvent and reinforce the commu-
nity’s role in the new service economy, create jobs locally
and improve the quality of community life (Eger 2009, 48).
In this sense, it is close to the idea of community infor-
matics (Marshall et al. 2004). Technological solutions lie at
the heart of the idea of smart city. Yet, in all sophisticated
conceptualisations, smartness goes beyond the kind of
intelligence that can be reduced to the application of new
ICTs. This is why both social and ecological dimensions
are essential elements of the smart city concept.
Smart use of ICTs can be seen both as an organisational
issue and as a driver that changes the wider societal envi-
ronment. Concerning the organisational level, smart cities
utilise state-of-art ICT tools to implement organisational,
managerial and policy innovations. ICT is a means to an
end, not an end in itself: a smart city employs it to make a
difference (Nam and Pardo 2011, 185). Indeed, although
application of modern ICTs is seen as an essential mani-
festation of smartness of a city in practically all definitions
of this concept, most applications also include wider policy
and governance dimensions required for organisational
innovation and investments in human capital, upgrading
skills of all those who live and work in cities as prereq-
uisites of a better urban society (cf. Carillo 2006).
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There is a question of how the ultimate goal of a smart
city should be understood. It may mean better community
informatics, improved functionality of urban life, higher
quality of urban life or achieving sustainability in human
settlements (see Fig. 1). These characteristics may be
complementary and so can be achieved simultaneously
whilst reinforcing each other. Thereafter, they may become
mutually exclusive if improved quality in the short term is
at the expense of sustainability over the long term; for
example, city governments incurring substantial debt by
borrowing to finance better quality services but risking
bankruptcy in the future.
Smart city concepts often appear to approach commu-
nity development from the point of view of the application
of new technologies, assuming that the implementation of
new ICTs together with organisational innovations promote
viable, improving and tenable urban living conditions. In
practice, though, big cities have to manage a portfolio of
many kinds of innovations and it is not self-evident which
constitute radical breakthroughs. In particular, ICTs make
it challenging for city councillors and other stakeholders to
choose between them because they lack the necessary
technological skills and also because not all ICTs prove to
be effective in terms of their take-up and use by service
users. ICTs may prove to be ineffective because citizens
and service users are often characterised by heterogeneity
of their demographic, socio-economic, racial and other
characteristics (as often are the other stakeholder groups as
well). Hence, smart city policy must be constructed in a
way that recognises the uncertainty that has its roots in the
diversity of community groups, which in turn helps in
dealing with the challenge that chosen technological
solutions carry with them inherent financial, reputational
and social risks.
Another problem may be the much too one-dimensional
perception behind smart city applications in development
policy, for neither the utilisation of ICTs nor the organisa-
tional and other innovations necessarily bring the kind of
quantifiable materialistic economic growth strived for by
politicians and developers. A new element to this discussion
has appeared in the form of smart growth, which provides an
alternative rationale for local economic policy. What kind of
growth should we actually strive for? Is all growth good for
our local community or only certain forms of prosperity?
What kind of growth is sustainable? Such questions have
challenged the widely held conventional view that growth is
always good, reflecting the critical view of the growth
machine thesis (Logan and Molotch 1987; Harvey 1989). In
contrast to the one-dimensional growth mantra, for example,
a smart growth policy responds to suburban sprawl to protect
natural habitats and farm land by using real estate planning
controls to increase the density of land use in city centres
(O’Connell 2009, 2012; Downs 2005).
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Fig. 1 Degrees of smartness in
the smart city concept High
Level of
smart Systemic
system’s dimension
socio-
ecological
integration
Informatics
(communication)
Low
Low
Smart city definitions tend to be normative and narrow
in perspective, assuming strong and positive development
effects necessarily result from widespread application of
ICTs to city life. This may not always be the net result,
however, especially if city governments minimise all other
investments in order to rely almost exclusively on ICTs.
Expenditures on ICTs may be at the expense of other forms
of investment that could also have promoted urban devel-
opment and welfare. Policy makers considering application
of smart city ideas should be aware of the presumption in
favour of ICTs and the alternative investments forgone (i.e.
opportunity cost) when budgets are constrained.
4 Smart city as organisation and governance
innovation
The smart city phenomenon is attracting an increasing
attention from urban scientists, combining modern ICTs
with organisational planning and design to unbundle
(‘dematerialise’) economic processes, cut bureaucracy,
streamline service processes and implement organisational
innovations (Toppeta 2010). Indeed, the smart city can be
seen as a conceptual innovation itself which, at the
organisational level, may be called smart, intelligent or a
learning organisation (Ellinger et al. 2002, 20). A growing
number of organisational scientists believe it is possible to
develop learning organisations able not only to create,
acquire, cultivate and transfer knowledge but also to
modify people’s and organisations’ behaviour based on
new knowledge, insights and brainstorms (Eriksson-
Zetterquist et al. 2011, 246; Garvin 1993). Similarly, city
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AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
Ecological
dimension
Ecological
systems
Social
(sustainability)
dimension
Social and
human concerns
(quality of life)
Intelligent
systems
(functionality)
High
Degree of technological embeddedness
governments have to become learning organisations before
they can formulate and implement smart city policies to
create smart production and smart consumption of their
services so as to increase the outcome effectiveness of their
policies and services.
The smart city model is a response not only to problems
caused by rapid urbanisation such as pollution, congestion,
scarcity of resources and deteriorating physical infrastruc-
ture but also to social and organisational factors such as
conflicting values, heterogeneous stakeholders and frag-
mented developers. Nam and Pardo (2011) consider the
smart city concept as an urban innovation in city manage-
ment and urban policy to deal with such urban problems.
The smart city is not a conventional product, service or
process innovation but, instead, is a conceptual or para-
digmatic innovation in changing beliefs and creating
understanding of what new ideas have to be adopted in
urban policies. Urban policy makers may use ‘smart city’
as a framework when they consider the need for, and
possibilities of, policy changes in different public service
sectors and when they plan city promotion and marketing
activities (Hollands 2008).
Smart governance requires a set of principles to be
adopted by urban governments expressing how to control
and guide city growth and what principles should apply in
internal and external stakeholder relations. Conventionally,
public sector governance has been concerned with how to
manage institutions. However, smart governance also tries
to harness and coordinate the enthusiasm and capabilities of
residents to directly and more accurately represent them-
selves, rather than depending on the abilities of their rep-
resentatives to aggregate and articulate their interests. The
AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
focus of smart governance is therefore on participation-
based organisational arrangements and democratic institu-
tions (Johnston 2010).
Within an era of heavily constrained local public
finances and associated austerity measures, for example,
these arrangements may involve ‘conversations’ between
smart city authorities and their local communities to help
decision-makers understand what is happening in those
communities from the viewpoint of different partners and
so to share decision-making with them (Lowndes and
Squires 2012). Such understanding can be used to make
room for socially creative innovations by helping to
encourage emergence of community leaders, to build trust,
to negotiate service outcomes and to promote their
achievement via collaborative arrangements such that city
authority–stakeholder partnerships are integrative rather
than—as has usually been the case—additive. This can
result in ‘the whole being greater than the sum of the
individual parts’—a cliché but no less true because of that.
Specifically, these smart partnerships have the potential
to go far beyond the use of conventional partnerships
between overlapping public sector organisations set-up to
reduce duplication and so cut costs. ‘Smart partnerships’
can add greater value by ‘designing into’ the social contract
between state and citizen the creativity that can change the
behaviour of service providers and service users and
thereby improve outcome effectiveness. Financial and
physical capital is reduced by use but human and social
capital can be accumulated by this virtuous circle of cre-
ative interaction between local communities and their city
governments, built on a shared analysis and understanding
of the contexts within which local public services are
produced and consumed and of how their outcomes are
created.
The above example makes clear that technological
platforms have to be embedded in social platforms if they
are to achieve smart outcomes. Put simply, cities do not
become smart simply by adopting ICTs—becoming a
smart city is a lot more complex than may be realised by
those promoting all-pervasive and unquestioning adoption
of ICTs. Nevertheless, ICTs can be utilised to develop
horizontal networks between diverse stakeholder groups
and city governments so as to improve governance of
services.
A new perspective on the change in the recent discus-
sion about governance emphasises steering and coordina-
tion functions on a non-hierarchical basis in a multi-sector
stakeholder field for the purpose of promoting collective
interests (Anttiroiko 2012). One of the recent concepts
reflecting this change is ‘connected governance’ built upon
interoperability, that is, the ability of public agencies to
share and integrate information using common standards
(Dais et al. 2008, 377). This change reflects an important
327
shift, namely the increased role of systems and platforms
that are used to facilitate creative collaboration and con-
tribute to the increase in and utilisation of systemic intel-
ligence. This has given rise to a new methodologically and
technologically oriented idea of platform governance. It
reflects the environment of power shared among interde-
pendent actors faced with ‘wicked’ problems—for exam-
ple, complex financial, security and environmental
issues—that cross organisational boundaries. A platform
approach to governance offers a framework for supporting
policy informatics, which is supposed to bring changes
notably on two fronts: first, technology can replace struc-
ture as a means of control by employing technological
rather than bureaucratic gatekeepers or facilitators; and
second, the platform approach has the capacity to increase
the flexibility and responsiveness of public organisations
involved in governance processes (Wachhaus 2011, 3, 7).
5 Smart service applications
As made clear above, the smart service concept relies on
both behavioural and systemic dimensions that reflect the
two interrelated categories of consumption and production.
In the next discussion, we approach smart services from
these two points of view: (1) individual use and con-
sumption processes, and (2) organisational interaction in
service provision. When these are combined with formal
threefold e-service typology—information, interaction and
transaction services—we end up with the following matrix
which points to the key aspects of smart services (see
Fig. 2). The idea is that ICTs can be used to facilitate such
human and social systems and processes which bring about
smartness in urban communities, i.e., socially creative
human experience and social engineering related to infor-
mation, interactive and transaction processes. The funda-
mental idea behind this scheme is that smart information
and communication systems are needed to build smart
creative social systems, which again are conducive to
sustainable urban life. When applied to services, it builds a
logical connection between service informatics and intel-
ligent and sustainable service systems.
There is a range of smart service solutions that operate
at inter-organisational or community level and facilitate
various information, interaction and transaction processes.
Smart cities develop place-based solutions to urban prob-
lems and needs by joining up all resources available in a
locality, for example, health, police and community safety
budgets to promote community well-being. In some cases,
the key is for city governments to give up control by
transferring their assets to the voluntary sector and com-
munities, so they can use and manage them to generate
income to create sustainable small-scale community
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Fig. 2 Individual and

organisational dimensions of
smart services
Level of analysis
Information process
Organisational facilitation in
and community organisation’s actions
interaction
e.g. Community safety
budget; local crime GIS;
information sharing
Information process
Individual facilitation in individual
use and use or consumption
consumption
e.g. Smart Santander
project; Community
navigator
Interaction process
facilitation in
organisation’s interaction
e.g. Planning 2.0; Forum
Virium Helsinki
Interaction process
facilitation in civic or
consumer interaction
e.g. Pre-paid Oyster
Card; Befriending
Transaction process
facilitation in
organisational
transactions
e.g. Timebank;
collaborative ventures
Transaction process
facilitation in civic or
individual transactions
e.g. M-payment (Cityzi)

Information services Interactive services Transaction services

Types of e-services

infrastructure and services more appropriate to community
needs. This approach has been adopted in Stockholm,
Sweden, where the city government has relinquished cer-
tain powers whilst still ensuring the strategic direction of
services (Department of Health 2010).
It was noted above that, in order to be smart by radically
redesigning and reconfiguring their services, city govern-
ments need to better understand citizen’s lives and how
they behave. This requires local communities to have much
greater influence on the reshaping of city services, holding
them to account and even running services themselves.
This proactive form of engagement is not the same as city
governments offering service users a passive choice from a
menu of alternative service configurations. Instead, service
professionals work with users (e.g. families) to co-design
and perhaps co-produce services to meet users’ preferences
and needs as far as is consistent with promoting achieve-
ment of public policy objectives. Engaging users—indi-
viduals, families and communities—can unleash users’
energy and initiative, changing city governments’ focus
from simply doing what is statutorily required to also doing
what is needed by city residents to improve their well-
being. Communities become partners with the local state
rather than simply passive recipients of services, building
social capital and creating sustainable and resilient local
communities.
In Finland, the city of Helsinki is running a cooperation
cluster called Forum Virium Helsinki (2012) to provide a
platform to develop ICT-based services in cooperation with
enterprises, public authorities and citizens as end-users.
The platform has concentrated on five project areas, one of
them being a smart city initiative focusing on the devel-
opment of mobile phone services to facilitate urban trav-
elling and living. It also opens up public data so that
companies and citizens can create new services by com-
bining and processing the data in innovative ways. This
resembles the LivingLab movement that has spread across
Europe in the 2000s (The European Network of Living
Labs at http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/).
Organisational and community level transactions can be
facilitated in various ways. One such example is a time
bank. Time banks may be part of community reward
schemes, issuing credits to people actively participating in
supporting their communities, those credits being exchan-
ged for use of leisure services and events provided free of
charge by local service providers in both the public and
private sectors (See the Web site of Timebanking United
Kingdom at http://www.timebanking.org/).
There is still a general absence of joint planning by city
governments with utility providers (e.g. water, in respect of
environmental sustainability) and other public services
(e.g. health care). Cultural barriers include commercial
confidentiality, whereas social media user groups work
with open data systems, causing problems for joint working
of cities with the private sector. This may create problems
for collaborative ventures between city governments and
businesses, and even with other public sector agencies, as
well as with voluntary and community organisations.
Nevertheless, collaborative ventures are developing, for
example, in the United Kingdom’s West Midlands region
where a consortium of 13 organisations (including two
cities, three universities and motor vehicle companies) are
testing low-carbon electric vehicles as part of the CABLED
project (http://www.cabled.org.uk/).
Beside time banks, social capital initiatives in the United
Kingdom include creative councils (http://simpl.co/nesta-
creative-councils), community catalysts (http://www.com
munitycatalysts.co.uk/) and building community capacity
(http://www.thinklocalactpersonal.org.uk/BCC/) schemes,
focusing on complex social needs, social care and aspects
of health care related to physical and mental illness and
disability.
Many smart service applications facilitate individual
consumption or service use. In the area of information

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services applied to such situations, for example, the Smart
Santander project enables people to receive real-time
online information on traffic flows, levels of pollution, etc.,
cities in countries other than Spain also being involved
(http://www.smartsantander.eu/index.php/testbeds/item/132-
santander-summary). Another example is the community
navigator scheme (http://simpl.co/Birmingham-City-Council)
and more interactively oriented befriending projects in
which volunteer ‘befrienders’ offer supportive relation-
ships with people who are socially isolated, be they
children, families, senior citizens, mentally ill or disabled
(http://www.befriending.co.uk/).
Other examples of applications of ICTs to urban life
include smart payment systems utilising ICTs to allow easy
use of transport systems, such as London’s prepaid Oyster
Cards. In France, Nice has become the first European city to
use the same near-field communication (NFC) technology to
enable payments via smart mobile phones, not just on trams
and buses but also in shops, museums and galleries. People
signed up to Cityzi can receive real-time updates of time-
tables, maps and information about their local area, as well as
purchase tickets for trams and buses (Balaban 2010).
It could be expected that further development of smart
city initiatives in the United Kingdom and other EU
countries will be hampered by the current austerity mea-
sures as governments try to reduce government borrowing
and debt as shares of gross domestic product (GDP). Par-
adoxically, however, increasingly severe restriction of
public finance may promote smart thinking to increase
efficiency by improving the use of scarce resources. The
possibility of creative engagement of smart cities with their
communities was considered above. Initiatives much less
dependent upon community engagement include develop-
ment of multi-agency infrastructure projects to share fixed
costs (e.g. of buildings), digitisation of access to public
services to provide virtual rather than real service points,
recycling waste hot water to heat public buildings so as to
reduce energy costs and using mobile phones to pay for
public services such as car parks to reduce staffing costs.
Such smart city developments are not usually supported by
coherent policy framework, but in the United Kingdom, for
example, there is an indication of the formation of a broader
central government policy ‘‘to create powerful, innovative
cities that are able to shape their economic destinies, with
civic and private sector leaders freed to look outwards to
businesses and communities rather than upwards to central
government for solutions’’ (Cabinet Office 2011, 1).
6 Design of e-platforms for smart services
In a generic sense, a platform is any physical, technological
or social base on which socio-technical processes are built.
329
It provides a structured and enabling environment for
technologies, applications or social processes (Anttiroiko
2012). The first widely discussed platform issue in the field
of e-enabled public governance and services revolved
around government Web sites. The next phase was the
discussion about portals, which became a buzzword in the
late 1990s. At that time, the global benchmark cases such
as the citizen-centric portal of Singapore and FirstGov.gov,
the single point of access to the US Federal government
launched in 2000, opened new horizon in platform design.
Thereafter, platform thinking began to pervade governance
discourse through such ideas as joined-up government and
collaborative government, which offer solutions to prob-
lems of how to facilitate the collaboration of government
agencies. More radical perspectives appeared since the new
ideas of Web 2.0, which set a completely new agenda for
platform thinking in governance. When this is added to
ubiquity and intelligence, we may have the core elements
of the platform discourse that is currently in the making
(Anttiroiko 2012).
A platform orientation in public governance allows
public organisations to manage policy informatics and
interactive processes in a coordinated manner. A platform
is not only a tool for managing information but also in a
wider sense a framework within which to involve key
stakeholders in governance processes and to seek solutions
to complex social problems. It makes it possible to extend
the collaborative dimension of governance in the form of
co-design, co-creation, and co-production (Wachhaus
2011; see also Bailey 2011).
Useful perspectives for the design of service platforms
are the open innovation marketplace created by InnoCen-
tive (https://www.innocentive.com/about-us/open-innov-
ation-marketplace) and co-design platforms developed in
the open innovation context (Antikainen et al. 2010;
Ahonen 2011). There is also a plethora of free open-source
platforms and content management systems for social
networking and content sharing (Pligg, NewsCloud, Dru-
pal, Dolphin, Elgg, Mugshot, etc.), free e-commerce plat-
forms (Magento, osCommerce, Zen Cart, VirtueMart etc.),
Web 2.0-based marketplaces and B2B sites (e.g. Freelancer
at http://www.freelancer.com/), innovation network sites
(e.g. Global Innovation Network, InnovationXchange), and
social network aggregation platforms based on API appli-
cations or OpenID, which provides inspiration for the
shape of future service platforms. They give a hint of how
e-enabled platforms may serve as ‘engaging platforms’,
which enhance the involvement and participation of citi-
zens, service users and other stakeholders for the benefit of
whole community and society (Ramaswamy and Gouillart
2010).
In service platforms, major functions include access,
creativity, sharing and integration, as illustrated in Fig. 3.
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330 AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334

Table 1 Major functions of Web 2.0 tools in public service provision

Main functions Examples of Web 2.0 Examples of public
services and service 2.0 applications
applications

1. Communication MSN, Yahoo, AIM Live Chat feature in

Integration Access and short Skype government Web site
messaging or portal
RSS feeds, Twitter
Service Use of RSS feeds and
platform Twitter in public
governance
Sharing Creativity 2. Content sharing YouTube, Slide.com, YouTube and blogs
Flickr, Multiply utilised in public
service
3. Social Facebook, MySpace, Utilisation of Facebook
networking Tagged, Netlog, and other social
hi5, Friendster, networking sites in
Orkut, PerfSpot, service provision
Bebo
Fig. 3 Major functions of service platforms (Adopted from Ant- 4. Crowdsourcing Wikipedia, 7tipson, User-oriented sections
tiroiko 2012) Patient Opinion of government Web
(UK), Delicious sites
Collaborative e-services
All these aspects can be seen to be a part of what we may Wikis in service design
call governance informatics (Wachhaus 2011; Koliba et al. Geotagging
2011).
Concerning access, platforms are supposed to provide Applied from Anttiroiko 2012
easy access to service processes. In this field, new tech-
nologies have a key role to play. The increased use of members of their community and as service users, and
ubiquitous technologies especially has a potential to cause progressively arrange their private spaces by integrating
major changes in such processes (e.g. Murakami 2003). the services provided by public agencies. This implies that
As noted above, another function for service platforms is the ‘user profile’ serves as the point of interaction for the
to support creativity and innovativeness, which provides public agencies to interact (Dais et al. 2008). Currently,
new ideas about local development, service delivery and most portal solutions are only aggregates of public service
solutions to various policy problems. Idea generation is an organisations and build on principles of government-cen-
important process especially if there is a need for radical tric perspectives without genuine integrative functions.
change, like a reengineering service delivery system or This approach is based on a belief that public service
rethinking the role of government (Anttiroiko 2012). delivery may be developed by an improved use of public
Platforms are also useful when we want to communicate sector resources, whereas the suggested integration plat-
with each other, share our ideas and collaborate with form emphasises personalisation as an important integra-
stakeholders. Such functions, which revolve around the tive element of platform design and utilises ideas of
idea of sharing, are typically associated with the Web 2.0 citizen-to-citizen contacts and community networks (Mei-
trend. Paradigmatic Web 2.0 platforms are social net- jer 2011, 598c). Accordingly, the key perspective on
working or content sharing sites hosted by some social integration in service processes and user democracy should
media or software companies (Steins 2009; Brabham 2009) be built on intelligent personalised solutions (Anttiroiko
(Table 1). 2012).
Due to increased fragmentation and complexity in Regarding the types of processes to be facilitated with
modern societies, there are increasing needs for system technologically assisted service platforms, a basic question
integration and coordination, the basic rationale behind the is what kind of knowledge processes we are supposed to
very idea of service governance. An answer to such a facilitate. The fundamental distinction is usually made in a
problem is an integration platform developed by Dais et al. knowledge management (KM) framework between well-
(2008). In their theoretical scheme, it has two main inter- structured routine problems, semi-structured problems and
faces, one for citizens (user profiles) and one for public at the other end of the continuum, ‘wicked’ problems that
agencies (integrated registry). The idea of such platform is are ill-structured or unstructured and highly ambiguous
to ensure a single sign-on access to cross-organisational (Koliba et al. 2011). To systematise the picture further, we
services. Citizens are able to create their own profiles as may distinguish four types of knowledge processes

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AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334 331

associated with the governance of service processes that Table 2 Technology-based service concepts
require different facilitation tools (Lenk et al. 2002, 71): Technological Main social dimension Functions of technologies
• Routine processes trends of given technology in service platforms
• Individualised decision-making Open-source Openness, Open platform design,
• Negotiations software modifiability and platform features that
• Democratic deliberation. collaboration support openness and
transparency
A service informatics platform supports decision-mak- Web 2.0 Short messaging, Broad citizen and
ing especially for semi-structured or unstructured problems social networking, stakeholder
through a computer-based information management system content sharing and involvement,
crowdsourcing crowdsourcing and co-
(Koliba et al. 2011). Routine processes require easy and production
simple platform features. Individualised decision-making is Geoinformatics Geographic and Locational aspects of
usually associated with user democracy and the use of locational governance and policy
public services. It requires easy-access service portals, information and making
which allow user-oriented service integration. Negotiations orientation
have a critical role in in-sourcing and outsourcing and, in Ubiquitous Multichannel Access to governance
technologies solutions, flexible processes, networks and
general, in taking care of B2B transactions and partnership access, mobility, platforms anywhere and
agreements. This requires platform features that provide systemic intelligence anytime
case-specific information and a support system for con- and remote control
tracting. Lastly, democratic deliberation in service context Adopted from Anttiroiko 2012
is a type of process in which varying opinions and interests
are articulated and aggregated and which provides legiti-
mate decisions and actions as the outcome. Such user future visions underpinning urban policy choices and
democratic processes need facilitation tools that support generates new development ideas which can be utilised in
deliberation and help the community to reach the best strategic city planning. These discussions raise the level of
possible solutions to complex service-related policy design awareness of urban policy stakeholders to the increasingly
and implementation problems (Anttiroiko 2012). complex human, societal, scientific and environmental
When these are combined with the emerging technology issues. Smart cities need an eclectic mix of visionaries,
trends, we can build a matrix of social computing and engineers, business leaders, policy makers, proactive citi-
service platform design. Some aspects of this model are zens and communities. They can facilitate more smart
meta-level changes and some are more phenomenon-level behaviour in response to growing urban problems, utilising
changes, referring to actual functions and services provided new technologies and platforms, which stimulate content-
by the platform. Generally speaking, technological form, individual-system and functionality-sustainability
dimension is relevant to all major aspects of service design dialectics.
and implementation (see Table 2). It has also been made clear that city governments have
The most important message behind the discussion to move away from a top–down approach to service
above (and Table 2) is that different technologies provide delivery and ‘lead from behind’ the bottom–up develop-
tools to support different aspects of smart service produc- ment of a smart ecosystem that becomes increasingly rich
tion, delivery and consumption. This requires that new in its complexity as it evolves into a multifaceted and
technologies are socially embedded and utilised in a diverse urban system based on open access to integrated
selective way to support different functions that build up information systems and self-sustaining growth of social
smartness in service systems. capital within an increasingly joined-up world that is
smarter and more environmentally friendly whilst, at the
same time, facilitating access (often remotely) to improved
7 Beyond instrumentality: towards the inclusive smart and more responsive public services that attain improved
city outcome effectiveness.
City and community governments may increasingly lead
Let us return to an important issue that has been referred to from behind but they will still need vision in developing
only briefly above. It is the need to avoid instrumentalism, long-term strategic plans to invigorate the local economy,
reductionism and technological determinism in the inter- improving the well-being of citizens, and guaranteeing
pretation of smart city concept. A positive dimension of the sustainability of the community. This means that smart city
smart city discourse is that it stimulates discussion about governments will no longer simply be service providers

123
332
and enabling bodies: their role is much more holistic and
ambitious in stimulating innovative thinking with busi-
nesses and communities through partnerships. From this
perspective, city developers prefer such smart city concepts
which are adaptable and developable so that they can
promote new types of processes of social inclusion in
growing and resourceful metropolitan communities.
The stereotype of the public sector as heavily bureau-
cratic, characterised by a silo-mentality and short-termism,
lacking scope for productivity improvements and also
inflexible and unresponsive appears to be increasingly
outdated. That stereotype fails to recognise the increasing
diversity of smart city initiatives within the increasingly
unbundled but joined up and coordinated new service
economy. Post-industrial cities developed as service cen-
tres and are now developing new economic, social, insti-
tutional and technological platforms to cope with
increasingly complex and profound social issues, espe-
cially in the large metropolises.
Although there is much commonality, not all cities are
becoming smart in the same way, at the same speed, or to
the same extent. In part this reflects the different require-
ments and capabilities of their populations, in part their
utilisation of localism agendas (e.g. in the United King-
dom) and in part their take-up of new technologies within
the different age, social and ethnic groups. The ICT
foundations of smart cities are obviously stronger the
greater the computing power within the palm of citizens’
hands and the greater the resulting Internet connectivity.
Ubiquitous ownership and 24/7 use of such increasingly
low-cost technologies can facilitate social capital through
real-time connectivity.
Smart solutions clearly do not fit within the conventional
supply side versus demand side policies for regeneration
and growth of urban economies, which have been domi-
nating approaches to economic policy. Instead, smart pol-
icies are much more integrative and inclusive of social
potential. Rather than identifying the problem as con-
strained supply or insufficient demand, smart city policies
identify innovation as the required response to the urban
imperative. This is not innovation in terms of improving
productivity of producers and their production functions.
Instead, it is innovation improving the sustainability and
resilience of communities within increasingly dense and
complex urban environments.
Here, innovation is not part of Schumpeter’s process of
creative destruction within the competitive market process
creating private value but, instead, part of a process of
creative collaboration and coordination through increased
interconnectivity of social groups and social and economic
institutions creating public value through social and gov-
ernmental processes.
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AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
The role of governance is much broader in collaborative
creation than in competitive destruction, not only because
of the greater number of stakeholders but also because
creative mutuality and cooperation is more difficult to
manage than destructive rivalry. Thus, the smart city con-
cept is radically different not only from the traditional
hierarchical line management approach to inputs and pro-
cesses of the conventional bureaucratised city, but repre-
sents also a significant step beyond the New Public
Management-oriented market-enabling cities of more
recent times.
8 Conclusion
Smart city is an important future-oriented concept, which
has potential to integrate new technologies, social systems
and ecological concerns. Yet, this requires an integrative or
holistic approach to the very idea of smart city in order to
become a reality. We have discussed this matter in respect
of one special aspect of smart city—that of smart public
services. The first step in their development is the devel-
opment of smart solutions for individual services but the
real potential lies in the second step, which is about service
governance and integrative functions which require some
kind of service platforms.
Our discussion has shown just what a multi-layered and
multidimensional issue is the smart city and its smart ser-
vices. The new service economy creates opportunities for
organising unbundled local public services in a pluralistic
and complex environment through the development of
technological and social platforms. New technology trends
provide opportunities for sophisticated applications to
support service informatics and integrative service plat-
forms. Social and ecological dimensions nuance this
evolving technological scenario by incorporating into it the
potential of creative partnerships to add greater social value
than can be provided by those technological solutions
alone.
The more integrative holistic approach outlined in this
article is necessary if we wish to conceptualise smartness
properly, i.e., in a way that takes into account not only the
technological and formal complexity of smart systems but
also the human and ecological context with which these
systems are supposed to operate and to which they are
ultimately supposed to bring added value in the form of
fair, rich, healthy, secure and sustainable life in a wider
community and global setting. Building such smart cities is
certainly a challenging task in facing technological, social
and financial risks but their construction is certainly within
human capability.
AI & Soc (2014) 29:323–334
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