This chapter presents a short thought piece that frames several of the key governance challenges that cities face when approaching the Internet of Things (IoT) and other “smart” technologies. Those challenges in particular fall within two buckets: human governance, and technical interfaces. First, the chapter looks briefly at two planned cities – the ancient Greek city of Thurii, and the modern cityscape of Quayside in Toronto, Canada – as exemplifying the different layers of inclusivity that can and should work well together in communities of trust. One proposed takeaway then raised is the desirability of planning digital communities that invite active human participation in the blended spaces between the self and the world, the private and public, and the physical and virtual. As it turns out, this takeaway is entirely consistent with the notions of participatory community governance at the heart of the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework.

This chapter frames Disney as a lab for public technology applications and uses it to explore information governance challenges associated with pervasive location monitoring, facial recognition, data integration across contexts, and the seamlessness of smart experiences and interactions, facilitated by MagicBands. It employs Disney as an analytical model for potential challenges and governance strategies in other public applications alongside a number of privacy challenges.

In October 2017, Alphabet and the Government of Canada announced a joint effort: the first smart city powered by Alphabet’s technology. The smart city was proposed to be built in Toronto, Canada, where Alphabet’s subsidiary Sidewalk Labs had partnered with public corporation Waterfront Toronto. Balancing public, private, and collective interests in smart cities is a challenging task, that is why Sidewalk Labs proposed some innovative instruments of governance and management in their city infrastructure. This chapter draws on the GKC framework to examine the company’s proposal for the governance of smart infrastructure. The analysis focuses on two action arenas: data-driven planning and the trusts.

Smart cities require trusted governance and engaged citizens, especially governance of intelligence and intelligence-enabled control. In some very important respects, smart cities should remain dumb, and that will take governance. This introduction provides an overview of the book’s aims, structure, and contributions of individual chapters.

This case study focuses on smart tech deployment and governance in Philadelphia. In 2019, the City of Philadelphia launched a new smart city initiative, SmartCityPHL. SmartCityPHL includes a roadmap of strategies, processes, and plans for deployment. In many ways, the new initiative is remarkable. It is ambitious yet pragmatic; it outlines a set of guiding principles along with deliberative and participatory processes; it is broadly inclusive of people and values – as reflected in its simple definition of a smart city: “a city that uses integrated information and communication technology to support the economic, social, and environmental goals of its community.” On its face, and perhaps in comparison with other smart city initiatives, SmartCityPHL provides an exciting roadmap. But the 2019 initiative was not the first smart city project in Philadelphia. There is, in fact, a long history of Philadelphians turning to supposedly smart technology to solve community problems.

This chapter outlines a forward-looking, intelligent approach to thinking through and evaluating supposedly smart systems. First, it clarifies that it is not the city that is smart. Rather, smartness is better understood and evaluated in terms of affordances supposedly smart tools provide actual people. Who gains what kinds of intelligence? For what purposes? Subject to what governance? Second, it identifies and addresses key challenges to intelligent governance in smart city projects. Cities must move beyond a transactional mindset, appreciate how smart systems become an integral part of the built environment, and develop appropriate governance. Third, it proposes an approach to smart city governance grounded in local, contextual norms and scaffolded by key questions to ask throughout smart city planning, procurement, implementation, and management processes. This approach is importantly not oriented around Elinor Ostrom’s famous design principles, but rather a shared set of evaluative questions to guide decision-making.

This chapter examines the case of institutional design for urban data governance in the City of Seattle as a collective action problem, referencing three prominent theoretical frameworks for examining institutional change and institutional economics. This work centers on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, which is adapted from Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework for natural resource commons and developed to study institutional arrangements for overcoming various social dilemmas associated with sharing and producing information, innovation, and creative works. Furthermore, this chapter notes the foundational integration of the IAD framework with Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost economics (TCE), highlighting the role of transaction costs in understanding the externalities associated with the governance of data.

Pittsburgh is arguably one of the great twentieth-century urban success stories, but in the twenty-first century, Pittsburgh is unexceptional. That makes Pittsburgh a good case for examining governance of smart city technology, because Pittsburgh is neither behind some imaginary urban technology curve nor ahead of it. Like many cities, it doesn’t aspire to be celebrated as a “smart city”; instead, it merely hopes to do well, even to thrive. Pittsburgh has steadily accumulated and deployed a broad range of technology systems as part of its public administration practice, celebrating its advances as often and as much as it might. The case study documents what might be referred to as “ordinary” or “normal” governance of smart city technology and governance via smart city technology. The chapter offers a broad historical take on ICTs and smart technologies in Pittsburgh. It also dives more deeply into some specific examples. Its research and presentation are pluralistic in tone, style, and method.

Smart cities require much more than smart tech. Cities need trusted governance and engaged citizens. Integrating surveillance, AI, automation, and smart tech within basic infrastructure, as well as public and private services and spaces, raises a complex set of ethical, economic, political, social, and technological questions that requires systematic study and careful deliberation. Throughout this book, authors have asked contextual research questions and explored compelling but often distinct answers guided by the shared structure of the GKC framework. The Conclusion discusses some of the key themes across chapters in this volume, considering lessons learned and implications for future research.

To further explore the issues discussed in previous chapters, this chapter uses the city of Bloomington, Indiana, and its open data portal as a case study. As open data portals are considered to be an instantiation of digital commons, it is assumed that its design and governance would support cooperation and community participation and at least some forms of communal ownership, co-creation, and use. To test these assumptions, the GKC framework and its concepts and guiding questions are applied to this specific case to understand the actions around the portal and their patterns and outcomes.

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges andopportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds a series of case studies examining smart technology deployment and use in different cities. This chapter briefly explains what that framework is, why and how it is a critical and useful tool for studying smart city practices, and what the key elements of the framework are. The GKC framework is useful both here and can be used in additional smart city case studies in the future.