Building Transformative Capacity: Comparing Chinese and European Smart Cities
In the development of Smart Cities, increasing the Transformative Capacity is critical to close the gap between planning and implementation of the Smart City goals. Transformative Capacity is the city government’s capacity to conceive, prepare, initiate, and perform cutting-edge urban changes. Meyer et al. (2021) provides insight to how different cities improve their Transformative Capacity and reflect on how Chinese and European Smart Cities differ in approaching this subject according to their local planning and governance context.
Chinese Smart Cities gain strong financial and legal capacity due to its mainly top-down planning process, which is usually based on pilot experiments. Most of these pilot projects succeed due to the comprehensive support from the higher government level, thus enabling the upscale and wider replication other cities. Leadership and ownership of the objectives, which is a critical aspect of transformative capacity improvement, are express in a more consolidated can centralised way while allowing space for the empowerment of local city actors. In the monitoring and evaluation process, Chinese cities have developed a stronger focus on structured peer-to-peer learning among urban development officials, and on bi-lateral learning and experience-sharing partnerships with other cities.
On the other hand, European smart cities have stronger tendencies to engage various stakeholders in horizontal way. The decentralisation of power translates into the Leadership and ownership aspect, which is more distributed in European smart city planning and implementation. It is also more apparent that in the European cases smart city planning and implementation success use more bottom-up-intensive approaches. Another unique aspect is the emphasis on innovative approaches and processes to facilitate cross-departmental as well as cross-jurisdictional collaboration, even though this comes with higher transaction costs due to the additional coordination efforts. While in the monitoring and evaluation were also used to develop best-practice examples and lessons-learned, which were shared with a wider group of stakeholders.
Reference:
Meyer, S et al. (2021). Enhancing Capacity Building for Urban Transformation as a Means to Close the Planning–Implementation Gap in Europe and China. In Towards Socially Integrative Cities (Vol. 9). MDPI, Basel.
