What is Smart City Governance?

Smart city governance is defined as an examination of the comprehensive public domain activities and services of a smart city. It further explores how political and societal governance systems can translate to run smart cities digitally.

Smart city governance is extremely essential for the management of smart cities so that citizens can be more well informed about the runnings of their smart city and so that the entire system can be more transparent.

Furthermore, smart city governance efforts aim to address the effects of smart city technology on the citizens that have to interact with the implemented digital infrastructure.

Why Smart City Governance Is Important

1) Determining tangible benefits to citizens

Before investing in smart city technology and digital infrastructure, local government bodies must first consider and evaluate the prospective tangible benefits that smart cities can provide to their citizens.

Therefore, it is important to determine the difference between citizen needs and wants. Also, local government needs to ensure that fundamental citizen necessities are not interfered with or altered.

2) Explaining the intended purpose of technology and funding

The implementation of smart city technology can inherently change citizen’s lives and ways of living. Therefore, it is crucial that the smart government explained in detail to citizens the intended purpose of the proposed smart city technology.

Furthermore, smart cities will only be able to obtain the optimum technological smart city solutions with the help of local resident involvement and financial investment. Therefore, smart city solutions should always be focused on the local citizens that will be affected most by the change.

3) Data security and encryption concerns

Smart city technology is usually highly dependent on monitoring user patterns, sharing data and gaining insight into consumer behaviour. However, some citizens may find these practices intrusive and vulnerable to data security breaches.

Therefore, it is vital that local government bodies explain the benefits of smart city technology. To clarify how their personal data and information will be protected and encrypted. Furthermore, it is also extremely important that collected data is utilised for predictive analysis and public discourse. Otherwise, the data tracking may be viewed as unnecessarily intrusive.

4) Consumer Trust

Even with public investments and funding, smart city technology will not obtain a maximum return on investment. At least not until consumers trust the digital technology provided. For example, 30% of consumers believe that autonomous cars are a potential liability.

It is clear that the digital and technological autonomy through smart city technology is a huge asset. But the local government needs to clearly communicate and demonstrate the importance, use, benefits and welfare of smart city technology to local citizens. This can be achieved through public awareness programmes and service announcements.

Low Code for Smart Cities

Corteza, Crust’s low-code, open-source digital work platform, is the perfect platform to help make the transition to a smart city seamless and flexible. Crust’s API-centric technology can be integrated with a variety of other platforms and offers users a variety of graphic visualisation tools that can be used to present data in a highly structured and useful manner. Try a demo so that you can utilise Corteza to automate and invigorate your smart city management.