Articles from our current Special Issue, Smart Governance in the Contemporary Era, have been posted! Please see all the links below for an introduction to all of our articles in this issue.
Introduction
By: Kevin C. Desouza, Naim Kapucu & Jiannan Wu
In the 21st century, we have seen an increase in activity around making cities “smarter” and “intelligent” through the creative application of information systems. In an ideal world, a smarter (and intelligent) city should be able to leverage data in real time to increase its situational awareness, thereby enabling effective and efficient decision-making at the individual, organizational, and collective levels to advance its goals of resilience, sustainability, and livability. From a design, planning, policy, and implementation perspective, however, our theoretical and empirical knowledge on smart cities is limited. One reason for this is the simple fact that the term smart city is nebulous. Some use the term smart city to highlight advances in sustainability and greening of the city, while others use the term to portray infusion of information via technologies to better the lives of citizens that reside in these spaces. Even others consider the presence of a high level of citizen engagement in the design and governance of the space as a key attribute of smarter cities. It is our pleasure to put forth five papers as part of this special issue on smart governance across cities in the contemporary era. The papers provide guidelines for cities to consider for designing and managing smart communities.
Table of Contents
1. Smart city initiatives: A comparative study of American and Chinese cities, by Qian Hu & Yueping Zheng
2. Paying for infrastructure in the post-recession era: Exploring the use of alternative funding and financing tools, by Akheil Singla, Jason Shumberger & David Swindell
3. How community mobilization mediates conflict escalation? Evidence from three Chinese cities, by Xiaolin Wu, Lin Ye & Xuelei Zhang
4. Revisit the drivers and barriers to e-governance in the mobile age: A case study on the adoption of city management mobile apps for smart urban governance, by Tian Tang, Jinghui (Jove) Hou, Daniel L. Fay & Catherine Annis
5. Open government data in the smart city: Interoperability, urban knowledge, and linking legacy systems, by Thomas Lodato, Emma French & Jennifer Clark
Journal of Urban Affairs 