Smarter Decision Making for City Planning
ICT is a powerful tool to achieve smart city including in the dimension of the governance system. Utilising ICT to encourage better public participation in the policy design and decision making is considered one of the goals of smart city approach. However, it is the collaboration of data collection from e-voting, sensors, and real-time information platforms, coupled with traditional face-to-face participation that combine multidisciplinary stakeholders that allows for a smarter decision making and city planning. By only devising ICT-based participation, city policy only allows for an aggregative participation or summing up the numbers of individual preference. While the latter allows for deliberative participation or making decisions that are resulted from pooling and interacting varying knowledge, skill sets, interests, opinions of collective stakeholders.
Smarter decision making, thus puts data from the ground and put them in the context of the city with its complex socioeconomic needs, governance system and funding mechanism. Making the process more practical, suitable to the broader institutional and territorial context and allows flexibility of governance arrangement to coexist with established policy priorities. Furthermore, big data with its immense bulk of information often underutilised to produce meaningful policy initiatives, due to the lack of understanding of how the data can be used and integrated to the broader strategic vision.
Reference:
Wolf, J., Borges, M., Marques, J. L., & Castro, E. (2019). Smarter decisions for smarter cities: Lessons learned from strategic plans. In New paths of entrepreneurship development (pp. 7-30). Springer, Cham.