Exploring the interplay between urban governance and smart services codesign

Abstract

The large spreading of e-democracy and e-participatory tools and environments showed, and is still showing, that technologies offer new direction for dealing with the challenge of scaling the deliberative democracy perspective up to the urban governance scale. The recent growth of Urban Living Labs and Human Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-scale of decision and the mechanisms of urban governance. In coherence with these perspectives, the article reports on the interplay between urban governance and the co-design of smart services in urban transformation as it has been observed and analysed in the two European research projects Periphèria and MyNeinghbourhood. The article also discusses the value of service codesign as a strategic practice to experiment new participatory governance in smart cities.

Keywords

• co-design
• planning
• public services
• urban governance