Enhancing Transformative Capacity for Smart City
Smart City thrive in a system that support collaboration and innovation. Yet, many smart cities still operate in a top-down governance structure that may limit the progress of development. One of the problem arise from the conventional governance structure is the gap between planning and implementation of smart city advancement. There often a mismatch between strategic direction form national or central government with the implementation by local or municipal government. This gap can lead to inefficient use of resources and local potentials, missing knowledge transfer and missed synergies, as well as lock-ins and frustration among the involved stakeholders. Closing this gap depends on the capacity to conceive, prepare, initiate, and perform cutting-edge urban changes by the city government, also known as Transformative Capacity.
Smart Cities can build their transformative capacity by measuring their current governance through the framework by Wolfram on ten independent key components of Transformative Capacity that are grouped into three clusters, as shown in the image. For example, in the Agency and Interaction Forms, city can analyse their diversity of actors involved in Smart City development and evaluate their commitment for actions and decisions to measure the multiform and inclusiveness of the city’s governance. City government can also assess the integration of strategy/planning/implementation across different sector and measure innovative actions and opportunities for experimentations in them to understand the Core Development Process. While in the Relational Dimensions, city can evaluate the current and historical experience in cooperation and problem-solving strategy between horizontal and vertical agencies.
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.
Wolfram, M. (2016). Conceptualizing urban transformative capacity: A framework for research and policy. Cities, 51, 121-130.
