Urban Governance - An Overview - ScienceDirect Topics

6/30/2021 Urban Governance - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
Urban Governance
Related terms:
Urban Planning, Local Government, Governance, Smart City, Urban Policy
Governance, Urban
Mike Raco, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition),
2020
What Is Urban Governance?

Urban governance is primarily concerned with the processes through which
government is organized and delivered in towns and cities and the relationships
between state agencies and civil society—a term that is used to include citizens,
communities, private-sector actors, and voluntary organizations. Governance has
multiple meanings. For some, it represents a concept and an analytical approach
that opens up new ways of thinking about processes of government, urban politics,
accountability, and democracy. For others, governance is a more descriptive term
that focuses attention on concrete institutions and their financing, roles, and
responsibilities. Key questions for the analysis of urban governance include:
- Who is it that makes decisions about the organization and implementation of
policy in urban areas?
- How are these decisions made?
- Who controls agendas and how?
- What policymaking processes exist?
- Which institutions/interests have the power and resources to shape policy
agendas?
- What control do local people and individual citizens have over the way their
cities are governed?
A focus on governance, therefore, draws attention to those interests that have the
power to make decisions about policy in cities and how processes of decision-
making operate. Effective policy development and implementation depends on
how systems of governance are organized, shaped, and structured. In short, a focus
on governance draws attention to both the technical and/or bureaucratic
organization of governments and the state and the processes and structures that
shape and constitute broader relations of power, domination, and authority.
These processes are particularly important in urban areas, for it is in cities that the
full effects of economic restructuring and globalization have been most keenly felt.
Cities in many countries, across both the Global North and South, are increasingly
divided and possess highly deprived districts juxtaposed with areas of relative (and
absolute) affluence. It is also in cities that, arguably, some of the most difficult
contexts for governing can be found. Modern urban areas often possess a greater
diversity of social groups and have a greater concentration of problems to be
tackled. Populations are also increasingly urbanized and what happens in towns
and cities has broader social, political, and economic impacts beyond the urban
scale. Indeed, it could be argued that urban governance is at the heart of broader
changes to the organization of the state and political debates over its appropriate
roles and functions.
The study of urban governance is principally concerned with the following topics:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/urban-governance 1/21
Urban politics: Urban politics is concerned with the relationships between different
groups of people and interests in society, especially, those relationships involving
the acquisition of power and authority. It is closely related to broader
conceptualizations of identity and representation and the decision-making
processes through which representations and decisions are made. Urban politics is
both formal and informal in character. The former consists of elections, political
parties, representative systems, and the like, whereas the latter relates to the softer
social relationships and networks that exist between different groups, actors, and
interests.
Changing modes of democratic representation: A focus on governance also draws
attention to the structure of political systems and broader concerns with questions
of political representation, democratic legitimacy, and accountability. Well-
functioning systems of governance both help to create, and are the consequence
of, healthy democracies. When systems of governance function poorly, the
legitimacy and relevance of democracy to citizens and communities is reduced, and
this leads to a spiral of declining participation and legitimacy. The movement
toward urban governance has also been elided with broader shifts in the nature of
democratic representation. Old-fashioned systems of government were built upon
representative modes of accountability through regular elections, and the principle
that elected individuals and/or parties carry a democratic mandate to represent
those who have elected them. The new urban governance, by contrast, is presented
as a system in which individual citizens, and the communities of which they are a
part, engage in direct, “participative” modes of governance.
Citizenship: This shift to participative governance has significant implications for
citizenship and the relationships between citizens and the institutions that govern
them. It involves the establishment of a new balance of rights and responsibilities
and the redrawing of boundaries of state action and regulation. Participative
governance requires a greater focus on what has been termed “active citizenship.”
In simple terms, active citizens are characterized as being politically, socially, and
economically independent. This independence enables them to take on more
responsibility for their own welfare so that they do not have to rely on state
bureaucracies and/or welfare services. Passive citizens, on the other hand, are often
portrayed as “dependent citizens.” Their passivity is increasingly seen, by
(neoliberal) governments, as a problem to be cured through government programs
and actions. In many countries, governments have, therefore, introduced measures
to foster new types of citizenship to underpin wider policy initiatives and
governance reforms.
Economic competitiveness: In recent decades, there has also been growing interest in
the relationships between governance and economic development. With the
growth of the so-called “new economy” based on “creativity” and
entrepreneurship, economic activity it is claimed, is increasingly dependent on the
networks established between firms and the support structures that exist with
institutions of government and civil society. The global financial crisis of 2008 and
its widespread impacts on the economies of cities have also reinforced the focused
on these relationships. Much of the rhetoric that accompanies the emergence of
the new urban governance is directly linked to the imagined role that decision-
making structures can play in creating entrepreneurial and attractive environments
for competitive businesses and individual entrepreneurs. Decision-making and
governance, it is argued, needs to be flexible and able to respond to new challenges
and opportunities in the global economy. The governance of economic
development has become an increasingly important issue in urban politics as
industrial cities across the Western world have sought to manage the
consequences of economic decline.
Privatization and the new forms of public–private working: Under neoliberal reforms,
governance has also been concerned with bringing private actors and resources
directly into decision-making and policy delivery structures. During the 1980s,
many Western governments introduced public management programs that
opened up welfare services to private operators under competitive tendering
contracts. Over time, these relationships have evolved and deepened. Under private
finance initiatives, and similar policy instruments, private firms increasingly build,
finance, manage, and operate services and public infrastructure, to such an extent
that state contracts and private financing have become some of the most lucrative
fields for profiteering within contemporary capitalism. Moreover, private-sector
knowledge, outlooks, and ways of working have become increasingly influential
and play a growing role in shaping how welfare systems are. For some, there has
been a mass privatization of welfare states and the opening up of new channels for
direct private-sector influence on decision-making and policy outcomes.
Urban sustainability: Governance is one of the key pillars of the sustainability
agendas promoted by agencies such as the World Bank, national governments, and
nongovernmental organizations. It is argued that economic development projects
will only promote new forms of equity if decision-making systems and structures
are broken open and made responsive and accountable to a broad section of civil
society. There has, therefore, been a renewed interest in the mechanisms through
which decisions are made, particularly at the urban scale, where the impacts of
development projects on different social groups have been particularly marked.
Urban politics, it is argued, can only become truly sustainable if new modes of
participative governance are introduced alongside economic and environmental
policy programs.
The “hollowing out of the state”: For many writers, particularly those writing from a
regulationist perspective, the emergence of the new governance reflects and
reproduces the broader transfer of powers away from nation-states to other actors,
working at a variety of scales. This process of “hollowing out” reflects and
reproduces a wider trend toward the creation of what neoliberal writers, such as
Osborne and Gaebler, have termed “leaner and fitter” government. By devolving
resources down to local and regional actors, while also ceding powers to global
institutions such as the World Bank and WTO, nation-states have shifted the
terrains of government and decision-making. Questions over this process of
rescaling lie at the heart of contemporary political debates over the organization of
the state and its capacities and priorities.
Social control: Governance is also bound up with broader questions of social
control. Historically, the ruling classes have seen cities as disordered places that
require careful management, regulation, and control. Establishing effective forms
of governance is one of the best mechanisms for the quelling of urban unrest while
enabling certain powerful groups to ensure that their visions, needs, and priorities
are articulated in policy programs.
Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008102295510650X
Governance, Urban
M. Raco, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009
What Is Urban Governance?

Urban governance is primarily concerned with the processes through which
government is organized and delivered in towns and cities and the relationships
between state agencies and civil society (a term that is used to include citizens,
communities, private sector actors, and voluntary organizations). Governance has
multiple meanings. For some, it represents a concept and an analytical approach
that opens up new ways of thinking about processes of government, urban politics,
accountability, and democracy. For others, governance is a more descriptive term
that focuses attention on concrete institutions and their financing, roles, and
responsibilities. Key questions for the analysis of urban governance include:
• Who is it that makes decisions about the organization and implementation of
policy in urban areas?
• How are these decisions made?
• Who controls agendas and how?
• What policy-making processes exist?
• Which institutions/interests have the power and resources to shape policy
agendas?
• What control do local people and individual citizens have over the way their
cities are governed?
A focus on governance, therefore, draws attention to those interests that have the
‘power’ to make decisions about policy in cities and how processes of decision-
making operate. Effective policy development and implementation depends on
how systems of governance are organized, shaped, and structured.
These processes are particularly important in urban areas, for it is in cities that the
full effects of economic restructuring and de-industrialization have been most
keenly felt. Cities suffer from high levels of unemployment, crime, and social
problems, and often possess deprived districts alongside areas of relative affluence.
It is also in cities that, arguably, some of the most difficult contexts for governing
can be found. Modern urban areas often possess a greater diversity of social
groups than nonurban areas and have a greater concentration of problems to be
tackled. Populations are also increasingly urbanized and what happens in towns
and cities has broader social, political, and economic impacts beyond the urban
scale. Indeed, it could be argued that urban governance is at the heart of broader
changes to the organization of the state and political debates over its appropriate
roles and functions. In short governance is not simply a matter of technical and/or
bureaucratic procedures but consists of a set of processes and structures that shape
and constitute broader relations of power, domination, and authority.
Urban governance is principally concerned with the following topics:
• Urban politics: Urban politics relates to the complex relationships between
different groups of people and interests in society, especially, those
relationships involving the acquisition of power and authority. It is closely
related to broader conceptualizations of identity and representation and the
decision-making processes through which representations and decisions are
made. Urban politics is both formal and informal in character. The former
consists of elections, political parties, representative systems, and the like
whereas the latter relates to the softer social relationships and networks that
exist between different groups, actors, and interests.
• Changing modes of democratic representation: Governance is also about the
structure of political systems and broader concerns with questions of political
representation, democratic legitimacy, and accountability. Well-functioning
systems of governance both help to create, and are the consequence of, healthy
democracies. When systems of governance function poorly, the legitimacy and
relevance of democracy to citizens and communities is reduced, and this leads
to a spiral of declining participation and legitimacy. The movement towards
urban governance has also been elided with broader shifts in the nature of
democratic representation. Old-fashioned systems of government were built
upon ‘representative’ modes of accountability through regular elections, and
the principle that elected representatives carry a democratic mandate to
represent those who have elected them. The new urban governance, by
contrast, is presented as a system in which individual citizens, and the
communities of which they are a part, engage in direct, ‘participative’ modes of
governance.
• Citizenship: This shift to participative governance has significant implications
for citizenship and the relationships between citizens and the institutions that
govern them. It involves the establishment of a new balance of rights and
responsibilities and the re-drawing of boundaries of state action and
regulation. Participative governance requires a greater focus on what has been
termed ‘active’ citizenship. In simple terms, active citizens are characterized as
being politically, socially, and economically independent. This independence
enables them to take on more responsibility for their own welfare so that they
do not have to rely on state bureaucracies and/or welfare services. Passive
citizens, on the other hand, are often portrayed as ‘dependent citizens’. Their
passivity is increasingly seen, by (neo liberal) governments, as a problem to be
cured through government programs and actions. In many countries
governments have, therefore, introduced measures to foster new types of
citizenship to underpin wider policy initiatives and governance reforms.
•
Economic competitiveness: In recent decades, there has also been growing
interest in the relationships between governance and economic development.
With the growth of the so-called ‘new economy’, economic activity is
increasingly dependent on the networks established between firms and the
support structures that exist with institutions of government and civil society.
Much of the rhetoric that accompanies the emergence of the new urban
governance is directly linked to the imagined role that decision-making
structures can play in creating entrepreneurial and attractive environments for
competitive businesses and individual entrepreneurs. Decision-making and
governance, it is argued, needs to be flexible and able to respond to new
challenges and opportunities in the global economy. The governance of
economic development has become an increasingly important issue in urban
politics as industrial cities across the Western world have sought to manage the
negative consequences of economic decline.
• Urban sustainability: Governance is one of the key pillars of the sustainability
agendas promoted by agencies such as the World Bank, national governments,
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It is argued that economic
development projects will only promote new forms of equity if decision-making
systems and structures are broken open and made responsive and accountable
to a broad section of civil society. There has, therefore, been a renewed interest
in the mechanisms through which decisions are made, particularly at the urban
scale where, the impacts of development projects on different social groups
have been particularly marked. Urban politics, it is argued, can only become
truly sustainable if new modes of participative governance are introduced
alongside economic and environmental policy programmes.
• The ‘hollowing out of the state’: For many writers, particularly those writing
from a regulationist perspective, the emergence of the new local governance
reflects and reproduces the broader transfer of powers away from the nation-
state to other actors, working at a variety of scales. This process of ‘hollowing
out’ represents a reaction to the expansion of government, local and national,
in the post-war era. In ideological terms, this represents part of a wider trend
towards the creation of what neoliberal writers, such as Osborne and Gaebler,
have termed ‘leaner and fitter’ government. Battles over the form and character
of governance are at the heart of contemporary political debates over the
organization of the state and its capacities and priorities.
• Social control: Governance is also bound up with broader questions of social
control. Historically, the ruling classes have seen cities as disordered places that
require careful management, regulation, and control. Establishing effective
forms of governance is one of the best mechanisms for the quelling of urban
unrest whilst enabling certain powerful groups to ensure that their visions,
needs, and priorities are articulated in policy programs.
Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104010890
Digital twins of cities and evasive futures

Paul Cureton, Nick Dunn, in Shaping Smart for Better Cities, 2021
Abstract
New forms of urban governance are emerging with the onset of digital twins and a
changing relationship between digital cities and designers. (Digital twins were
developed by NASA for technology roadmaps and Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) for computational simulation of material complexity and
failures of systems on aerospace vehicles. Digital twins refer to digital replicas of
existing and proposed assets to improve management, virtualize testing and
maintenance, and maximize efficiency gains. The term was coined by Michael
Grieves in 2001. (Michael Grieves and John Vickers, “Digital Twin: Mitigating
Unpredictable, Undesirable Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems.” In
Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Complex Systems: New Findings and Approaches, eds,
Kahlen, F.-J., S. Flumerfelt, and A. Alves. Cham (Switzerland: Springer International
Publishing 2017), 87.) As networks of emerging digital twins are drawn together in
a national model for the United Kingdom, it is worth exploring the implications of
each digital twin and its sensor systems and ICT framework in relation to physical
places. (This mode resulted from the UK government’s Industrial Strategy,
Infrastructure and Projects Authority, National Infrastructure Commission's Data
for the Public Good (2017), and the Digital Framework Task Group (DFTG). The
Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) is developing the digital twin information
management group along with ICE.) City digital twins are an evolution of the
Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city concepts, where advanced information
modeling and networking are leveraged to facilitate complex urban management.
The fundamental driver is to unlock built environment data for improved decision-
making, operation, and testing of scenarios.
Digital twins, as an integral part of a smart city and smart nation digital ecosystem,
may have captured the imagination in terms of urban futures, but their relation to
the specifics of place warrants critical analysis. There remain many urgent and
important questions on the “frictionless futures” the smart city paradigm presents
as a seamless entity of large-scale digital infrastructure and physical cities and what
it inadvertently excludes (Dunn and Cureton, 2019). Ambitions for city digital twins
would ideally need to avoid the ambiguity and intangible nature of the smart city.
The absurdity of the pursuit is rendered by Michael Batty: “Thus the question ‘what
and where is the smartest city?’ not only has no answer, it is also ill-defined, largely
because smartness or intelligence is a process, not an artefact or product.”
(Michael, Batty, Inventing Future Cities. Cambridge (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2018), 178.) In practice, as with many technologically driven impulses, city digital
twins may never achieve the potential they are conceived to be capable of. City
digital twins in their current form are GIS and BIM fusions, providing useful test
and semantic models of places released as open data on web and mobile platforms.
These city information models (CIMs) are useful for urban designers as they
provide a level of digital detail for placemaking, which also function as a platform
for consultation. However, while considerable attention has been given to their
seemingly unfettered capacity to address complex urban issues, in this chapter, we
examine the limits of their capability to frame why the future cities they supposedly
shape are always out of reach.
Read full chapter

Placemaking
Donagh Horgan, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second
Edition), 2020
Abstract
In spite of intentions, neoliberal urban governance and planning policy over recent
decades has led to divided communities, increased segregation, and displacement.
There has arisen an encroachment of the private into previously public space, a
growth in elite gated communities and increased precarity for those on lower
incomes. In this context, this article provides an overview of the concept of
placemaking—a progressive practice and process, in which policymakers,
nominated experts, and community stakeholders collaborate to deliver on a mutual
vision for change in the built environment, and approaches to community
flourishing. This article first chronicles the emergence of this increasingly popular
philosophy of urban design, with reference to key protagonists—Jane Jacobs and
Jan Gehl. Ways in which placemaking practices open up new opportunities for
bottom-up approaches to sustainable community development is then
documented, followed by reflections on future practice.
Read full chapter

New Municipalism
Ismael Blanco, Ricard Gomà, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
(Second Edition), 2020
A New Governance
Beyond the substantive changes it seeks to promote in the urban agenda, the new
municipalism also aims to transform collective action in cities. The changes that
the new municipalism seeks to promote in this field are inspired by the logic of the
common, a logic that seeks to overcome the classic dichotomy between the
public/institutional versus the private/mercantile. Some theoretical referents
frequently cited by the new municipalism thinks tanks are, for example, the work of
Polanyi, who explained how the dominant tensions between the market and the
state have provoked the historical erosion of the cooperative bases of society;
Ostrom, who analyzed the organizational foundations of the community
management of common goods; Rosanvallon, who through the notion of
communality vindicates the fundamental role of solidarity links and the recognition
of differences in spaces of proximity; Hardt and Negri, who through the notion of
commoning place value on the sustained building of constituent capacities of
social self-government; or Laval and Dardot, who synthesize the politics of the
common as the articulation between the logics of active democracy, the cooperative
generation of value and the community appropriation of services and public
spaces. The common is thus conceived as a political principle that places value on
local cooperative and participative practices, practices that are presented not only
as an alternative to the competitive dynamics of the market but also to the state
hierarchies.
The logic of the common is thus reflected in the promotion of new forms of urban
governance in which five key strategies stand out:
- The territorialization of governance: decentralizing urban policies by bringing
them closer to the neighborhood level while promoting new strategies for
horizontal cooperation between neighborhoods and cities and the multilevel
cooperation between urban governments and other tiers of government;
- Urban policies coproduction: articulating networks of collaboration between
different types of urban agents, placing a special emphasis on the engagement
of lay citizens and social and community organizations and on the rebalance of
urban power;
- Promoting community action: empowering communities and strengthening
their capacities for collective action; community action is thus conceived as a
collective action strategy based on the free and conscious commitment of the
citizens—that is, as an alternative to neoliberal individualism and institutional
paternalism;
- Open management to citizenship: a municipal management rooted in the logic of
the common requires the participatory management of those services and
urban spaces that are central to people's daily lives, such as cultural, social,
education, and health facilities.
- Promoting social innovation: the crisis and the impact of public cuts have
stimulated the emergence of numerous practices of social innovation aimed at
meeting collective needs such as housing, energy, culture … through social
cooperation. The new municipalism is committed to promoting and
supporting this type of practice, respecting its autonomy and favoring its
scaling up, scaling out and networking.
In a city like Barcelona, with a long tradition in the field of participation and
collaboration, the deployment of the governance schemes promoted by the new
municipalism entails the deepening and radicalization of preexisting participatory
practices. Among many other examples of democratic radicalization, we can
mention the impulse of the digital platform “Decidim Barcelona,” a participative
democracy platform that through the combination of on-line and off-line tools,
allows citizens to make, discuss, promote, and improve different kinds of urban
projects. As commented in a joint article by Laura Roth (Barcelona in Comú), Brad
Lander (New York City Council), and Gala Pin (Barcelona City Council; 2018: 113):
municipalism is much more than putting progressive local policies into practice; it
implies a decentralization of power that equips communities with the tools to
make decisions collectively. The good news is that the local level offers
opportunities for radical democracy that other spheres of government do not:
participation, transparency, and accountability are easier to achieve on a smaller
scale and by institutions closer to the people.
Read full chapter

Urban Megaprojects
Fernando Díaz Orueta, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral
Sciences (Second Edition), 2015
Urban Entrepreneurialism and Megaprojects

Already in the late 1980s, some authors were calling attention to the transition
from a model of urban governance based on managerialism to another based on
entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989). In this new model, urban policies favor
competition among cities, in the hope that economic growth will generate
prosperity, welfare, and employment for the majority of the population. Although
initially developed in the United States, urban entrepreneurialism also reached the
cities of Western Europe. Urban megaprojects are a strategic element of urban
entrepreneurialism, transmitting an image of status and power and thus attracting
investment (Dyble, 2013). Therefore, they are primarily oriented toward the market,
competitiveness and profit, leaving social commitments, such as employment and
affordable housing in the background. Ultimately, it comes down to getting
significant returns, and that is basically achieved through the construction of luxury
residences and hotels, large-footprint office towers, and shopping malls (Fainstein,
2008).
Compared to other developments, the process of definition, approval, and
implementation of urban megaprojects makes their management enormously
complex. In fact, a large part of the literature on these behemoths analyzes not only
the emergence of new forms of management and planning, but also funding and
taxation mechanisms. All this is in a context of growing multilevel
interrelationships in which the number and diversity of those involved in the
decision-making process multiplies. Given the complexity of these projects, their
implementation spreads over time, subject to the vagaries of economic cycles.
Therefore, study of the coalitions supporting megaprojects and their multilevel
relationships is essential in order to understand not only their gestation and
administration, but also their sustainability over time and even, when it does occur,
their failure.
Such coalitions work hard to obtain social support in favor of the development of
megaprojects. This support is achieved through institutional and politicoeconomic
structures that redirect public attention away from controversy and, therefore,
generate or at least try to generate the depoliticization of megaprojects (Lehrer and
Laidley, 2008). For example, in the case of the waterfront development in Toronto, a
city studied by these authors, public participation was not initiated at the time of
considering new development choices, but only once the decision as to which
option was preferable had been taken. In fact, the majority of megaprojects erected
in many cities of the world have not had any participative processes, either before
or after approval.
Such has been the case with most of the megaprojects in Latin American cities. In
fact, in these cities it is common, once the decision to go ahead with such a project
has been made, for a process to operate that openly bypasses both the urban
planning offices of and even political channels, regarded as overly reliant on
democratic public debate (Lungo, 2002). As a result, these projects serve the
interests of a small minority while producing displacement of the less advantaged
from their neighborhoods, further deepening the processes of urban segregation
and social exclusion. This tends to reinforce the existence of islands of modernity
surrounded by large areas of poverty.
Promoters of megaprojects linked to major transport infrastructure are also
perceived to evade and even violate the practices of good governance, transparency,
and participation in decision-making processes (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Such
practices are perceived as hindrances hampering development of the projects. This
approach can produce profound and lasting environmental damage, given that by
not taking into account the need for impact assessments or doing them in a very
lax way, infrastructures that should never have been erected or built without the
necessary precautions are constructed.
In addition, this markedly business-friendly orientation exerts substantial pressure
on local governments, especially in a climate of severe financial constraint. For
example, Dyble (2013), analyzing the case of Skyway in Los Angeles, highlights the
way its management evolved so that, in the context of globalization, the emphasis
on a transport policy that prioritizes long-distance connections rather than local or
regional integration led to this major infrastructure becoming an important part of
urban governance now run largely according to financial criteria. In fact, given
public finance constraints, governments have been more inclined to negotiate the
entry of private funding. But there is no doubt that the growing presence of private
funding means that the public sector loses an important part of the ability to
control projects.
Since the contexts where megaprojects arise are varied, both socioeconomically
and from the political and cultural perspectives, it is possible to detect significant
differences and peculiarities between different experiences. In this regard,
comparative studies are very revealing. For example, Doucet (2013) discusses two
projects, one local initiative in the city of Rotterdam and one in Glasgow, promoted
by the private sector. Comparative analysis identifies important differences between
European cities, highlighting the way that when municipal authorities lead and
coordinate the project, business objectives are more easily achieved than when the
public sector is limited to facilitating the activities of private developers. Doucet,
without abandoning the perspective of urban entrepreneurialism, also stresses the
need to analyze the role of individual actors and leaders involved in the process.
In an equally comparative key, Fainstein (2008), analyzing different megaprojects in
the cities of New York, London, and Amsterdam, highlights how in the latter two
cities, and particularly in Amsterdam, a true social democratic ethos had survived.
This means that, in contrast to what happened in New York, the two European
cities at least until 2008 held developers to certain social and environmental
requirements. Above all, even with difficulties the welfare state seems to present
greater resistance in countries like the Netherlands, which would imply a model of
urban governance with greater government leadership and a certain level of
commitment to egalitarian goals. In London, recent research shows how some of
the large urban operations associated with hosting the 2012 Olympics have
generated powerful gentrification processes (Watt, 2013). In other European cities,
such as Barcelona, the urban model is increasingly oriented toward
competitiveness, displacing other considerations to the background (Degen and
Garcia, 2012).
In the coming years, with the consolidation of the neoliberal vision of the European
Union, it is foreseeable that the reality will increasingly resemble that of the USA,
with a clear deepening of social inequality, a simultaneous increase in poverty
indicators and the concentration of wealth in the hands of very small sectors of the
population.
Read full chapter

DEMOCRATISING smart city citizenship: Penta helix

multi-stakeholders policy framework from the Social
Innovation perspective
DrIgor Calzada, in Smart City Citizenship, 2021
3.4 Results: Beyond the PPP

This chapter argues that applying the Penta helix multi-stakeholder framework,
albeit adapted to the unique context of urban governance, can support the city
councils of the follower cities to manage their own update transitions towards a
more democratic smart city approach. The Penta helix framework is intimately
connected with the logic of the city business/social models insofar as it provides an
understanding of the stakeholder composition while essentially serving as a policy
tool for city governments to articulate the smart city strategy.
To operationalise Penta helix, the fieldwork action research was conducted by
triangulating desk research, in-depth interviews, and validation workshops (Fig.
3.2), assisted by a semi-structured questionnaire encompassing five strategic
dimensions.
The Penta helix framework was conducted by systematising five strategic
dimensions through the questionnaire in which each person responded
individually to and later validated collectively the following aspects: (i) which helix
each stakeholder belonged to (composition), (ii) which was the most influential
helix (influence), and (iii) which was the most proactive helix (proactivity). Moreover,
regarding the suitability of the resulting the business/social models (DPP, PPP,
PPAP, 4PA, and U/DC), each person responded to (iv) whether he/she knew the
meaning of PPP and (v) which business/model was the most suitable in general
and as per the smart sector (energy, mobility, and ICT).
Regarding the first strategic dimension, amid the global picture of the three
follower cities, the most represented helix was the public sector. However, it is
remarkable that the profile of stakeholders following this hegemonic helix
respectively is academia, the private sector, social entrepreneurs and activists, and
civil society. Strikingly, though, the composition in the three follower cities varies
considerably: While Essen and Lausanne (with a strong academic presence) were
highly represented by people from the public sector, Nilüfer was represented by the
private sector, owing to the great interest in developing a new economic model for
the metropolitan area as a consequence of the demographic boost. However, in the
three cases, we could highlight the regular presence of stakeholders representing
the fifth helix, which this chapter refers to as intermediaries.
Examining the second strategic dimension, the fieldwork enquired about the most
influential helix and found that, globally, the public sector still overcomes the
private influence. However, from case to case, the most influential helix varies:
Lausanne overwhelmingly (and consistently with its current publicly owned
flagship district intervention, Plaines du Loup) selected the public sector and
underscored academia as the most represented helix in the composition of its
framework, which entirely contrasts the results obtained in the other two follower
cities. In Essen, the strategic alliance between the private and the social
entrepreneurs/activists appears to be the most influential helix with strong public
support. On the other hand, in Nilüfer, owing to the institutional boundaries and
politically fragile situation, the triad between the public-private-civil society still
appears to influence the multi-stakeholder policy framework.
The third strategic dimension related to the level of proactivity in each helix per city
illustrates a rather regular picture with almost similar distribution in each city per
helix (between 16% and 24%). In line with the rationale of this chapter, the fifth
helix reveals itself as part of the ecosystem of proactive stakeholders in the three
follower cities. Case by case, in Essen, it seems inspiring and hopeful that the
leading proactive role of the civil society contrasts with the low level of influence
provided to this helix. Similarly, in Lausanne, the proactivity level observed in the
private sector differs from the low level of influence regarding this helix. Ultimately,
in Nilüfer, the public sector seems to be leading in both its level of influence and
proactivity.
After examining the three strategic dimensions related to the multi-stakeholder
framework regarding composition, influence, and proactivity, the fieldwork focused
on the resulting business/social models. Notably, the fourth dimension asking
about the understanding of the PPP sparked a deep discussion in the validation
workshops of the three follower cities, which in itself demonstrates the openness of
stakeholders in the three cities to go beyond, or at least question, the internal
arrangements of the PPP. Furthermore, responding to the two intertwined research
questions of this chapter, the debate in the validation workshop invited further
exploration of how SI can occur through intermediating smart city initiatives
among stakeholders by establishing ad-hoc business/social models. This aspect
was responded to operationally through the fifth strategic dimension.
The fourth strategic dimension entirely focused on the knowledge of PPP. Despite
the expected affirmative answer being a generic answer, the level of debate in the
validation workshops among stakeholders, particularly in Lausanne and Nilüfer,
explains and illustrates the doubts, as many responded with Maybe and directly
with No: While 40% in Lausanne responded with Maybe, and 12% in Nilüfer opted
for No. These findings clearly reveal that PPP could have entirely different
interpretations and positions, which contrasts the idea of it being the only
business/social model in the multi-stakeholder framework, as this chapter
elucidates.
Ultimately, the fifth strategic dimension depicts an interesting comparative result
for each city, despite that the most suitable model (not the only one, though),
generically speaking, was the PPP. Lausanne predominantly and collectively
selected PPP and PPAP, but Essen and Nilüfer appeared to show an experimental
strategic willingness when selecting U/DC. A reason that could explain these results
is the openness and willingness for a further experimental approach insofar as
cities seemed to embrace further complex business/social models that result in
interdependencies among stakeholders and the related decision-making processes.
From the current DPP in Lausanne, stakeholders clearly and collectively pointed
out PPP and PPAP as a suitable step forward. In the case of Essen, the alliance
between the private sector and the entrepreneurial ecosystem presumably derives
to a model with intermediaries, bricoleurs, assemblers, and brokers for
transforming the regional economic model as a whole, supported by a strong
public sector. Finally, Nilüfer, being dependent on the current DPP model but with
resilient leadership in the public sector, may be keen to further exploring PPP,
PPAP, and even 4PA by gradually including social innovators in their
transformational processes, as is the case with the strategic endeavour of the city
council of Nilüfer to establish the Centre for Social Innovation.
However, the suitability of business/social models clearly differs from city to city
when focusing on specific sectors, which clearly validates the rationale of this
chapter suggesting to going beyond the PPP hegemonic model. The debate on the
validation workshop was conducted through specific initiatives and projects related
to ongoing implementations in the energy, mobility, and ICT sectors. The detailed
analysis of such interventions goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless,
the emergency of a plethora of actions subject to be openly discussed among a
wide range of stakeholders clearly indicates the potential of the variation of such
models for democratic deliberation in smart cities.
As such, starting with energy, follower cities selected their current position as the
most suitable one. In Lausanne, the model on DPP for the district heating fits
consistently with the flagship project Plaines du Loup and apparently well into the
expectations of the stakeholders. In Essen, PPP appears to work so far due to the
ongoing collaboration among the municipality and the local corporation (E.ON
SE), by paving a path for 4PA with the potential proactive role of academia and civil
society. In Nilüfer, PPAP appears to be a suitable option as a result of several
ongoing energy co-operatives jointly established with the university.
Considering mobility, another different business and social rationale from the
perspective of stakeholders determine the strategic selection: the PPP model for
Lausanne and Nilüfer, while 4PA is the most suitable model for Essen. According
to the stakeholders’ validation workshop, Lausanne shows great dependency on its
DPP model in the city. The next step to revert this logic was the PPP, yet simply as
an evolution on the business/social model of the city for this sector. Consequently,
Lausanne aspires to include further involvement of stakeholders, as Eqlosion
attempted in the workshop, by establishing further links and interactions. In
Nilüfer, the situation was a bit more divided: the lack of sustainable mobility
demands clearly signal a shift towards a PPP model, although several key
stakeholders could see the potential of U/DC as well insofar as an informal, socially
rooted, and highly networked transport system called dolmuş—share taxis—works
efficiently (Özbilen, 2016). This informal mobility system would require a sharing
economy platform based on Data Commons to enhance its socioeconomic impact
in the metropolitan area of Bursa (Calzada & Almirall, 2020; Yakowitz, 2011). Essen
was already implementing several mobility systems integrating citizens through
parking and public transport apps. In the next chapter, Chapter 4, REPLICATING,
the way smart cities interact between each other and, most importantly, learn from
each other, will be shown. In this chapter, several specific smart city actions will be
detailed. Chapter 3, DEMOCRATISING, focuses on the broad picture and the
multi-stakeholder policy framework analysis.
Finally, in the ICT sector, Essen chose U/DC, whereas Lausanne and Nilüfer
preferred PPP and PPAP, respectively. This sector witnessed the marginal selection
of the DPP, acknowledging a weak potential to absorb the investment in data
governance and regulation, while Essen embraced new initiatives on Data
Commons (U/DC) as a way to take the lead in the post-GDPR context instead.
Lausanne admitted its clear weakness in this field, and Nilüfer demonstrated its
preliminary smart city platform project led by the university.
Read full chapter

Neighbourhood Planning
S. Pinnegar, in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012
Abstract
Neighbourhood planning is a rich concept capturing a number of debates which
have been at the heart of city planning and urban governance issues over the past
100 years. Interest spans notions of the design, constituent elements and
development of the ideal urban (or suburban) community, and the role of the
neighbourhood unit as a means of both physical and social organisation, through
to its more recent articulation as a framework for improving local democracy and
participation in a collaborative planning process. In the context of the latter, a
number of case study cities, where neighbourhood planning approaches have been
used to identify, negotiate, and reconcile wider strategic interests with community
interests and concerns, are presented.
Read full chapter

Gated Communities
Renaud Le Goix, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
(Second Edition), 2015
Landscapes of Walls: An Historical Perspective

Gated cities have a long history. Socially and physically defined urban enclaves are
as old as cities themselves. Private urban governance emerged in nineteenth-
century industrial European cities such as London and Paris, where the new
industrial bourgeoisie sought in privately operated and enclosed suburban
neighborhoods, a quiet retreat from the busy city center. Le Parc de Montretout, in
Saint-Cloud, France, developed in 1832, was probably the first of its kind (Le Goix
and Callen, 2010). In the United States, the spread of GCs has roots in that
country’s long-standing ideology of suburban development, exclusionary zoning,
and redlining (Ihlanfeldt, 2004; Kato, 2006). One early thread of influence is the
romantic suburban utopias and utopian-influenced projects. Haskell’s Llewellyn
Park was probably the first modern GC built in the United States. It has
continuously operated a gatehouse and a private police force since 1854 and
introduced private governance of shared amenities based on deed restrictive
covenants that protected the stability and homogeneity of the neighborhood. A
second thread links America’s modern GCs to the historical processes that brought
CIDs and exclusionary restrictive covenants laws from Europe to the United States.
McKenzie (1994) explores the long European history of restrictive covenants and
residential associations (observable since 1743 in London). The first homeowners
association (HOA) per se was created in the United States in 1844 in Boston’s
Louisburg Square. Llewellyn Park and Roland Park (1891) were the first large
privately owned and operated luxury subdivisions, yielding exclusive
neighborhoods. They established consumer and real estate developer expectations
and legal and organizational approaches that helped shape contemporary private
urban governance in the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century,
this kind of high-end subdivision became quite common (Mission Hills, Missouri,
in 1914; Kansas City Country Club District in 1930s; and Radburn in 1928). Along
with landscaping and architectural requirements, the idea of social preferences as a
commoditized attribute has become common in CIDs. Exclusive lifestyle
developments became common by the turn of the 1960–70s, designed as mass-
consumption real estate developments, financed by large corporations attracted by
potential profits and backed by the Government through the Department of
Housing and Urban Development.
Historical investigation of gated enclaves has produced a rich international
comparative analysis that reveals the importance of local focus on the condition of
appearance of gated developments. In China, GCs are nothing new, but simply a
continuation of enclosed work-unit territories and the walled low-rise courtyard
houses and residential neighborhoods found traditionally in villages and urban
neighborhoods (Wu, 2005). In fact, China’s strong control over land and housing
has enabled municipal governments to engineer a faster rate of retreat to private
(collective) territorial government than has been possible in any other country. This
is partly because of the strong legacy of collective organization left by the central-
planning era.
Read full chapter

Governing Through Technology and the Failure of

Written Law
Alois Paulin, in Smart City Governance, 2019
4.1 Unsustainability of e-Gov: Legal (Un-)Certainty, Monopolization,

Exclusion
When IBM coined the smart city buzzword, they managed to position themselves
as an obligatory passage point for technology in the context of urban governance.
Another such example is the United Nation’s e-Gov ranking,2 in which they set the
general standards, which states then strive to fulfill. In both the cases of the e-Gov
rankings and the smart city hype, the addressed public apparatuses reacted
impulsively by jumping on the bandwagon and venturing into building a variety of
online systems—more often than not simply to remain in competition with other
cities and states. This “me-too” mentality has led to a jungle of e-Gov artifacts. The
pressure to follow trends has resulted in hastily built e-Gov systems which are
often no more than an end to themselves.
The crux of this e-Gov jungle is that it is not a system of systems, as it would be
desirable in theory (this is where the transactional stage of e-Gov comes in), but
rather an arbitrarily grown set of larger and smaller repositories, interfaces, and
Web presences, each of which represent some fiefdom for a bureau to reign. The
maintenance and evolution of these systems impose huge costs, which, if the
systems are to remain, drain resources from the public apparatus. Once funding
stops, the system becomes yet another ruin in the e-Gov jungle in the form of a
nonfunctioning system, broken link, or outdated registry.
The manifold problems of the existing approaches to building e-Gov systems are
known as the three hazards of e-Gov (Paulin, 2013): (I) the intrinsic expiration date of
IT e-Gov artifacts, (II) implied monopolization and exclusion of competition, and
(III) nonadherence to the principle of legality. These hazards lead to the conclusion
that modern e-Gov must not be seen as a sustainable solution, but rather as a
pioneering approach before some such sustainable solution can be engineered.
4.1.1 Hazard I: The Expiration Date
It goes without saying that at the design time of an e-Gov system, only then-valid
laws can be taken into consideration (it is impossible to predict which regulations
will be in force in the future) and, hence, changes in law will require a change of
such a system. The entanglement between the law and the technical systems built
to digitalize procedures and functionality mandated by the law can be dealt with in
three different ways: a change of law can lead to a reengineering of the system, the
old system can be replaced with a new one, or law can be mandated to the
technology so that law is adapted to fit technology. Here are a few examples.
In 2009, in Slovenia, a new e-Justice system was published to handle the insolvency
proceedings according to the Financial Operations, Insolvency Proceedings, and
Compulsory Dissolution Act (ZFPIPP3)—the then-valid law. In this system (Bezeljak,
2009), users can use pre-prepared PDF templates of forms required for actions in
legal proceedings to interact with the system through dedicated user interfaces.
They can use this system to enter data, electronically sign the documents, and to
verify such signatures. They can also use this system for retrieving data from Web
services offered by other e-Gov systems. The ZFPIPP was enacted in 2007 and
underwent approximately 10 changes between 2009 and 2013, a few of them due
to ruling by the Slovenian Supreme Court. There are no reports of how strongly
these changes of ZFPIPP influenced this e-Justice system; however, it is very likely
that certain parts of this highly complex e-Gov system became legally obsolete and
that they had to be reengineered.
Peled (2014, chap. Introduction) points out this problem of perpetually changing
law in the case of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS):
Since the 1954 overhaul of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, Congress has passed 238
additional tax laws. Because tax laws are not retroactive, IRS programmers have created
and continue to maintain multiple annual tax ‘versions’ of the entire Internal Revenue
Code […] Moreover, tax laws often have an effective duration after which they expire. So,
each annual software layer inside the IRS electronic mountain must know which
information elements to ‘borrow’ from other historical layers and how to correctly use
the borrowed information.
IRS’ “electronic mountain” (Peled, 2014) has been built for decades, using COBOL,
a programming language that was popular in business and government circles
between the 1960s and the 1980s. By the end of the 1980s, this language was
already considered to be falling into decline. Given the strong reliance on COBOL
by these antiquated government IT infrastructures, this language is tolerated still
in the 21st century, albeit no longer as a part of modern university curricula.
In Montenegro, in 2011, a population registry was designed to integrate various
administrative proceedings as individual workflows pertaining to the then-valid law
(Horvat, 2011). During the requirements-analysis phase, the team found
discrepancies in the law which made it impossible to engineer the system as
desired. To overcome this, the law was changed such that the system could be
designed. Needless to say, future lawmakers will face a system too big to be changed
that will severely impact their freedom in drafting new legislation.
Slovenia’s market inspectorate received a completely reengineered system in 2009,
which was needed due to the large number of changes in different acts (Naraks
and Golob, 2009). The result was a full-fledged document management system
with over 200 predefined templates that either fully or partly automatized different
administrative workflows. The system was designed to be extendable so that future
workflows could be added at runtime. Nevertheless, the authors noted that further
updates and adaptations would be required to keep the system fit for use as the law
changed.
Fluctuating legislation is a particular challenge when designing e-Gov systems.
When a public procurement management system was developed in Slovenia, the
development team reported severe challenges with the continuously changing
legislation (Kolar, 2009) during the process of development. Another challenge was
found when interacting with the public administration officers—as they were
indignant about having to deal with a new system, many excuses were brought up
which obstructed the development. By 2009, when the system was already in an
advanced stage of use, the developers came to the conclusion that the system was
already in need of renovations, updates, and readjustments due to changes in the
law.
Even seemingly harmless cases tell a story of e-Gov decay, such as the case of
Slovenia’s central dog registry. Established in 2000, due to changes in national and
EU legislation in the first 8 years of operation, a new registry had to be engineered
by 2009 (Kos and Zorman, 2009). Among the key reasons for the development of
the new system were, the obsolete technology of both the back and front ends, an
inefficient data model, missing connectivity to other vital registries, and unfitness
to respond to changes in veterinary practice and regulations.
In 2011, the management of Slovenia’s treasury was massively reengineered.
Before the reengineering, a multitude of heterogeneous e-Gov systems managed
the public finances; however, these failed to provide sustainable functionality. Thus,
between 2007 and 2010, a unified system was developed and engineered, whose
development (in terms of functional adaptations and updates) continues into the
future.
Another such simple, though perhaps common, vulnerability of e-Gov systems is
the case of US Department of Defense’s embarrassing situation in 2005, when the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro. As the
development and maintenance of their back-end systems was outsourced to
another company, which was bound to a strict system update schedule, the United
States was not able to use the new name in official communication until the next
scheduled update of the system (Burton, 2011).
A final example comes from our own 2014 to 2016 observations of a governance
system in use at the Vienna University of Technology, which was used to administer
the course duties of a large number of students. The system was developed to keep
track of student activities, make assessments of their performance in given
assignments, providing statistics and insights into individual student’s curricula,
and the like. The system was developed several years prior by technical staff and at
that time was tailored to fit the needs of a single member of staff. The functionality
of the system was thus fixed to a single defined workflow of how to manage
students throughout their participation in the course. As new staff joined the team,
bringing in new views and experiences, demands for modifications of the system’s
functionality reached the developers, which were met with objections and resulted
in conflicts. The new staff requested access to the underlying databases and the
code itself in order to take development into their own hands, which, however, was
rejected by the developers for fear of losing their monopoly on the situation. A
solution was found by dismissing the technical team and appointing a new one,
which developed a new system. But this solution did not solve the problem that the
academic staff remained dependent on a technical team’s availability and
cooperation. In this particular case, the system did not expire due to changes in
legislation, but rather due to changes of requirements. Nonetheless, this boils
down to the same issue: the system expires once the context changes.
The implied expiration date of e-Gov systems is a crucial factor of their
unsustainability. This factor is not the only hazard of e-Gov, but unlike the other
two, which will be described further below, this one is very easy to understand.
Each user of an e-Gov system can observe how changes occur themselves, as these
changes reflect in changed user interfaces, changed functionality, and so on.
4.1.2 Hazard II: Monopolization and Exclusion
In the case of the university course described above, the system developers
managed to make themselves indispensable. Thus, even though they were formally
subordinate to the academic staff, they managed to become more powerful. As
they had a monopoly on the technical knowledge for maintaining and updating the
technical system that was required for administering student’s duties and
administering, correcting, and grading tests, they were in a position where they
could dictate the modalities of maintenance and flow of work. They stubbornly
refused to hand over this know-how and the underlying code—after all, they could
not be confident that their positions would remain relevant once the academic staff
gained control of the system. Ultimately, the academic staff could only dismiss the
developers and let somebody else develop a new system.
In this case, the academic staff lacked the motivation to interfere with the
developers and left them in control of their sinecure. The staff benefitted greatly
from the systems created by the developers, as it allowed them to efficiently cope
with the large workload that could otherwise not be managed. This modus operandi
corresponds to what the German sociologist Luhmann termed useful illegality4
(Mayr, 2011, p. 44), i.e., a situation in which an organization deliberately does not
operate by the book, as it is mutually beneficial to go against formal rules,
relations, and regulations.
As Walter (2011, p. 44) discusses, this kind of useful illegality plays a vital role in
stabilizing state bureaucracies, as it can fill gaps in legislation in order to allow
agencies to operate in accordance with their core missions. Filling such gaps,
which span between what the legislator has defined and what the state agencies are
commissioned to deliver, is an unavoidable task when it comes to e-Gov systems.
While legislators merely define the gross functionality of the systems, the details of
the concrete implementation, which are crucial to bring the systems to life, are
shifted implicitly to the system designers and developers.
Bovens and Zouridis (2002) emphasized the role of useful illegality in the context of
e-Gov systems. Rather than referring to it as e-Gov, they call the technization of
public administrations system-level bureaucracy, which in essence corresponds to
the transactional stage of e-Gov (see p. 43), i.e., the situation in which
interconnected e-Gov systems are capable of generating administrative decisions
with no, or very little, human intervention. They emphasize that a new class of
politically unauthorized people, such as system designers, legal policy staff, and IT
experts, gain “discretionary power to convert legal frameworks into concrete
algorithms, decision trees, and modules” (Bovens and Zouridis, 2002). While this
new class of politically unauthorized “ad hoc bureaucrats” can play a beneficial role
(i.e., “getting things done,” in terms of useful illegality), they do contribute to
making e-Gov systemically unsustainable by becoming indispensable and thus
excluding competition.
To illustrate the hazard of monopolization and exclusion within e-Gov systems, we
discuss three examples: The European e-ID landscape, the Austrian Bürgerkarte e-
ID system, and the Slovenian SVEV system for secure electronic delivery. In all
three cases, there is a concrete legal basis which defines (and mandates) the
existence of technical artifacts in the highly sensitive domain of electronic
identification, authorization, and signing. However, the law did not clarify how
these systems should be constructed from a technical perspective and omitted
other crucial characteristics—Section 4.2 will take a closer look.
Electronic identity (e-ID) technologies have received significant worldwide
attention in the years around the turn of the millennium. From a technological
perspective, e-ID is the realization of the principle of public-key cryptography,
where a cryptographic algorithm utilizes a pair of entangled keys—a public one
(which can be openly known to anyone) and a private one (which is known only to
the person who is encrypting this piece of information). These two keys are linked
mathematically in such a fashion that it would be unreasonably difficult (e.g., it
would take thousands of years) to guess the private key if the public key was
known. Information which has been encrypted using the private key can be easily
decrypted by means of the public key (or vice versa), and by this, the information
can be definitely linked to the holder of the private key. An alternative use of this
principle is for digital signing (the holder of the private key encrypted a token such
as a “hashed” message, which is algorithmically linked to the original message) or
identification, whereby an identification provider signed a certificate, which can be
used for purposes of trusted identification. e-ID technology will usually serve the
purposes of both identification and digital signing.
To boost the IT industry and adjacent ecosystems, legislation mandated the
existence of the electronic signature (e-Sig), which was to have equal validity as the
handwritten signature in the face of law. A crucial milestone for legally significant
electronic interaction in the European Union was Directive5 1999/93/EC.
Implementation of this directive into national law should have been realized before
July 19, 2001. Although the directive explicitly focused on e-Sigs, the other aspects,
namely identification, authentication, and thus the regulation of e-ID, were implied
(Myhr, 2005). Directive 1999/93/EC was deliberately designed to be technology-
and vendor-neutral in order to protect the European single market from regulative
tendencies of national states (Dumortier, 2004). Further, a temporary electronic
equivalence to the legal concept of handwritten signature—the qualified electronic
signature (Qe-Sig) (also technology-neutral)—was also defined so that in cases
where legal code required a “handwritten signature,” this requirement would be
satisfied by that type of e-Sig (Dumortier, 2004).
As the directive strongly focused on establishing a regulation that would be
technology- and vendor-neutral, it failed to provide clear definitions on which
technology to use for creating and verifying e-Sigs. Governments, which wanted to
imminently provide electronic identification and signing as part of their e-Gov
systems, went on to sponsor providers of national technological solutions, who
later became monopolists in providing technology that complied with the
requirements of national e-Gov systems. This led to the rise of a number of
heterogeneous, national e-ID providers, whose reach was confined to the national
borders of their respective national state, which is not compliant with the
foundational European ideal of border-free movement and business.
On the basis of Directive 1999/93/EC, a European “Babel” of mutually
incompatible national e-ID systems emerged, in which the e-ID issued by one
member state’s national provider was not accepted by another member state’s e-
Gov system. In order to overcome this problem, the European Commission funded
the STORK project, which aimed to create an interoperability solution in the form
of a middle layer, and which would translate between the respective national
solutions of the participating member states. However, the project was confined to
the level of piloting, was limited to concrete applications, and failed to provide a
systemic solution to the problem of lack of mutual recognition of electronic
identification and signatures across borders.
The Austrian national e-ID, the Bürgerkarte (citizen card, CC), is a highly
sophisticated and globally unique mechanism for providing identification,
authorization, and signing, designed for the online interaction between citizens
and government agencies. Unlike other European national identification schemes,
which often rely on smart-card technology (Arora, 2007; Rissanen, 2010), the
Austrians chose a technology- and vendor-neutral approach for the CC. In fact, the
CC is not a concrete technology, but rather only an abstract legal concept defined
as “a logical unit, which regardless of its implementation binds a qualified e-
signature with the Identity-Link.” The Identity-Link is a small piece of information—
an “assertion,” stating the identity of a person. This concept is likewise a legal one
with a technical instantiation born out of the legal-technical vacuum of the
Austrian law.
Several technical recommendations that regulate the features of the CC have been
designed; however, these have not been issued by any politically empowered body
and are consequently not binding by law. Besides, using the CC is only optional.
Austrian legislation merely requires that access to sensitive personal data from a
public registry is granted only to unambiguously identified requesters, provided
that the request can be unambiguously authenticated; proof for both must be
given in electronic form. In principle, technologies other than the CC can also
satisfy these legal provisions. But then again, these conditions, as luck would have
it, are automatically fulfilled by using a CC, and hence, the CC is not only
recommended but also the only mechanism for identification, authentication, and
signing that one can use with Austria’s e-Gov services.
As Austria is a member state of the EU, it must not discriminate against other
providers of e-ID technologies from the EU that comply with the directive.
However, the Austrian e-Gov services only factually support the CC as
implemented by a single national provider that is closely personally and
professionally linked with agencies that regulate the Austrian e-ID landscape
(Paulin, 2012). The Austrian e-ID landscape is thus controlled by a network/clan,
which provides their services as a monopoly and prevents national alternatives or
foreign providers from offering their services in Austria.
There is little information available about cases in which independent providers
have attempted to challenge national monopolists in order to get their own
solutions accepted by national e-Gov systems. An isolated case of such an attempt,
however, has been documented in the scope of the Slovenian electronic delivery
framework SVEV (RS-AC, 2011), as shall be described below.
The background of the Slovenian case is similar to the one of the European e-ID:
legal provisions for submitting applications electronically were first enacted for
administrative proceedings in 2006 and later for civil legal proceedings in 2007.
Both almost identically regulate that applications in electronic form are sent
electronically to the information system of the addressee, which automatically
confirms the receipt of the message. However, a detailed definition of such an
“information system” has been omitted. To make matters worse, both laws contain
provisions that allow subjects to actually demand delivery in electronic form, whereby
specialized electronic delivery providers should deliver messages into the
addressee’s secure electronic mail box, which, however, is not defined in detail either
by law or by bylaws (Paulin and Welzer, 2013).
In the case of the Slovenian electronic delivery framework and the European e-ID,
informal clans are the drivers behind local legislative activities, which enable
privileged technical solutions to assume monopolistic roles in domestic markets,
through which those clans secure the development and maintenance of their own
technical solutions to the disadvantage of outsiders.
4.1.3 Hazard III: Legal Certainty
Legal theory distinguishes between public law and private law, whereby public law
regulates the relations between the state and its citizens—ergo, relations between
the sovereign and its subjects—while private law regulates relations amid the
subjects based on their will (Horwitz, 1982; Toplak, 2008, p. 23). A major difference
between public and private law is that private law restricts the freedom of the
subjects, while public law empowers the sovereign. In societies that adhere to the
rule of law, the sovereign (ergo, the political bodies of the public apparatus)
operates in accordance with the principle of legality, which means that every action
and every decision made by the state must be explicitly defined by law. This applies
both to stated decisions and to the procedures that lead to them (Jerovšek, 2000).
This fundamental legal principle not only allows subjects to exercise control over
the sovereign, but also guarantees legal certainty—the sovereign’s actions are
transparent and foreseeable. Legal certainty prevents the state’s bodies (e.g.,
government, police, and courts) from acting or deciding arbitrarily, which is crucial,
as state despotism would break core legal principles, such as the principle of
equality before law (Šinkovec, 1998, p. 31).
e-Gov, however, challenges the principle of legality, as it delegates government
behavior to e-Gov systems, hence machines. This might not seem to be an issue at
first glance, and authors such as Bovens and Zouridis even argued that from the
perspective of equality before law, e-Gov (there, system-level bureaucracy) “may be
regarded as the zenith of legal rational authority [as] thanks to ICT, implementation
of the law has been almost wholly disciplined” (Bovens and Zouridis, 2002, p.
181).6 But does e-Gov really make procedures perfect?
From a technical perspective, functionality offered through e-Gov systems often
contains procedures which subjects can initiate (and communicate with) remotely,
whereby such procedures are executed on the server of the particular agency. The
communication between the subject and the sovereign (represented by the agency)
is thus channeled through technical communication between the technical
equipment of the subject and the serving terminal of the sovereign. Unlike human-
to-human communication, which is based on the interpretation of analog
messages (voice, text, body language, …), digital communication is discrete, exact,
and unambiguous. Human communication, for example, does not rely on strict
grammar or correct pronunciation of words—two foreigners will be able to
perfectly communicate in English despite their ignorance of its grammatical rules.
Likewise, general human perception is based on the interpretation of analogue,
ambiguous information—e.g., we can visually recognize a car even though we have
never seen it in the exactly same environment, shape, angle, etc. On the other
hand, it is impossible for two computers to communicate without adhering to
strict protocols that regulate the exact semantics of the transmitted signals and
information. So, when we say that human interaction is analogue and computer
interaction is digital, we imply that the former is ambiguous and therefore must be
interpreted, while latter is unambiguous and precise by definition.
e-Gov, too, should comply with the digital nature of machine-to-machine
interaction, which is another concern in the realm of legal certainty. In the real
(analogue) world, interactions are subject to interpretation, and hence, legal
certainty can be achieved by defining spaces of discretion within which interaction
takes place. An administrative proceeding, for example, is initiated by submitting a
written and signed application to the responsible government agency. The fine
details of the message are a matter of discretion—it does not matter on which
material the application is written, it does not matter which font is used, nor is
there a need for exact wording in the application. Since the interaction takes place
in an analogue dimension, it is expected that the addressee will be able to
understand the request. On the other hand, any digital request sent to a digital
system must follow a clear and unambiguous protocol that rigorously defines the
rule of the structure and the rule of the semantics.
This, then, is something new. Law has always governed only the relations between
human beings—by limiting the freedom of its subjects, the sovereign has
regulated their behavior. To regulate behavior, Lawrence Lessig (2006, chap. 7)
identifies four constraints: laws, social norms, the market, and architecture. Law
regulates by ordering people to behave in a certain way while threatening
noncompliance with punishment—e.g., we may drive our car on the highway only
within a certain speed limit, or else we risk getting fined. Social norms, too, resort
to threatening with punishment (e.g., social isolation), but unlike laws they are not
imposed “top-down” by the authority (by the sovereign), but rather evolve from
within the community itself—e.g., loud neighbors might be scorned by the other
neighbors for their disturbing behavior. Markets regulate through the
offer/demand ratio; influence by the sovereign can be exercised, for example, by
forbidding the import of certain goods (e.g., drugs), or by imposing selective taxes.
The fourth modality is architecture, which regulates by constraining the physical
environment. In the real world, these are streets which divide neighborhoods,
bridges that connect riverbanks, or public squares where people meet. Regulation
through architecture has also been applied in the form of broad boulevards in Paris
to prevent uprisings (an effective mob requires density, which was easily achieved
in the narrow alleys in old Paris (Lessig, 1999, n. 18)); to German state institutions
by placing them in different cities—the High Court in Karlsruhe and the legislature
in Berlin, in order to discourage corruption (Lessig, 1999, p. 507); and to curb child
prostitution in Vienna where road barriers were placed on streets to prevent the
cruising of clients in the infamous Stuwerviertel neighborhood (News.at, 2008).
Lessig aims to outline how cyberspace is regulated, unfolding his analysis based on
the premise that cyberspace is ruled by the architecture of its “code.” By “code” he
means “the software and hardware that make cyberspace the way it is” (Lessig,
1999). There is a point in that—if anything rules the myriads of electronic
messages that zip around the globe each second, it is neither law nor social norms,
nor the market, but clear and strict architecture of the software and hardware
systems through which they traverse.
But herein lies the main point of the third e-Gov hazard: If a user (the client)
interacts with an e-Gov service, they must engage with an administrative
proceeding with characteristics that are hard-coded within the architecture of the
online system. The messages the client exchanges with the service’s remote
endpoint (the server) are exchanged following an implied protocol, which both the
client and the server understand. To understand what’s going on, we can take a
detailed look at an exchange of messages. When a Web form is interacted with in
the Web browser, the user first composes an HTTP7 request (e.g., enters a Web
address into the browser window); this is sent to the Web server of the e-Gov
application’s back-end system over the Internet. The server then responds by
composing and sending an HTML8 Web page, which the requester’s terminal
equipment (e.g., the Web browser) may (or may not) visualize and present as a user
interface to the requester for further interaction. Over a series of such requests and
responses, the user interacts with the e-Gov service to achieve what they intend to
do—e.g., renew their car registration. What is important to understand here is that
the Web server (thus, the e-Gov system) has no influence on how the client treats
the response, nor does it know whether or not the response was received at all.
The services which e-Gov systems provide, such as filing a tax return, registering a
change of resident address, applying for social benefits, or accessing data from a
public registry, all fall under the domain of public law. The exchange of messages—
the user’s requests and the server’s responses in the interaction between the user
and the e-Gov system—are thus administrative proceedings initiated by the user
with the goal to influence their legal status or rights (cf. Chapter 6) or to be granted
access to public information. From this perspective, it becomes evident that legal
principles must also be applied to this dimension in order to assure legitimate,
nondiscriminative access to e-Gov systems. Hence, in the same way that human
officers are obliged to lead administrative proceedings in accordance with formal
procedures that are transparent and public, so should the procedures by which e-
Gov systems process and handle requests be defined in a transparent and
legitimate way. Unlike in the analogue world, where it is sufficient to define the
objectives of the key steps of formal proceedings, cyberspace requires an
unambiguous definition of procedures, protocols, and also other details, such as
the location of the systems within the Internet, due to its architectural principles.
The inability to know the exact protocol of interaction with an e-Gov service implies
that one cannot harness the potential of the available online channel. On the other
hand, if the protocol was clear and documented, one could derive added value by
automatizing interaction, or by embedding the e-Gov service into a more complex
solution. As an example, we can consider the tedious task of renewing the car
registration year after year. If one could rely on the clarity of a standardized
protocol for interaction with the respective national e-Gov service, an automated
workflow could easily be set up and connected to a calendar app, which would
trigger the car registration on a certain date. Alas, even though this would be the
effect of a proper adherence to the principle of legal certainty—i.e., the reliance on
the transparency and availability of a protocol—it is not part of any e-Gov system
so far.
In order to assure genuine legal certainty of e-Gov systems, each system’s internal
architecture, processing logic, public interfaces of all kind, and so on would need to
be carefully documented and legitimized by a politically authorized body. However,
anyone who would be courageous enough to document and properly legitimize
each and every technical endpoint, each communicational protocol, and each piece
of code used in the existing e-Gov applications would end up facing a nightmare of
endless recursion-like Sisyphus. It is not that achieving legal certainty with
technical artifacts is impossible—Part III discusses this in more detail—it is simply
that modern e-Gov systems have not been designed with legal certainty in mind.
For this reason, e-Gov is also not sustainable if scrutinized from the perspective of
core legal principles.
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6/30/2021 Urban Governance - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

Urban Planning, Local Government, Governance, Smart City, Urban Policy

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City, Culture and Society

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