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Smart governance technologies are emergent information and communication technologies (ICT), which amid the COVID-19 pandemic have been widely used to govern COVID's impacts. However, very few studies have provided insight into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of smart governance technologies under COVID-19. This prevents the widespread usage of smart governance technologies across cities and countries and impedes their usefulness during emergencies. This study combines knowledge of emergency management theory and planning support systems (PSS) to frame the functional usefulness of smart governance technologies in handling practical tasks amid the COVID-19 state of emergency into a task-technology fit model. By employing qualitative content analysis to collect views and insights from the international news-based cases (n= 69), we identify SWOT of smart governance technologies under COVID-19. Results indicate that usefulness of smart governance technologies is reflected in task-handling in the ex-post emergency phases of response (e.g., provide e-health service, tracing and tracking) and recovery (e.g., improve e-government services, enhance collaboration for renewal), whereas few applications focus on tasks in the ex-ante emergency phases of mitigation (e.g., hazard analysis, vulnerability assessment) and preparedness (e.g., planning, training and exercises). Main findings lead to a conclusion that hidden capacities of smart governance technologies can be fully achieved if policy makers and practitioners can focus on the full range of tasks and demands before, amid, or after emergencies and identify collaborative opportunities for technological development.

According to many scholars, building a smart city requires "smart" governance approaches, including new government structures, new relationships, and new processes. Here, smart governance can be generally understood as the capacity to apply digital technologies and intelligent activities in the processing of information and in decision-making and creating innovative institutional arrangements. It requires reshaping the role of governments, citizens, and other social actors, innovating organizational and decision-making processes, and improving the use of existing and emerging information technologies to conceptualize and frame a new generation of e-participation. In practice, however, neither the development nor the advancement of smart governance is satisfactory. The implementation of smart governance in practice is mainly characterized by a corporate-led, technocratic way of governing cities. This raises the question how a transformative smart governance of cities can be conceptualized and developed and what role ICT should play in the transformative smart governance of cities. More recent studies show that the long experience of planning support ICT studies in handling technological innovations is able to offer potential insights into the innovative development and application of new ICTs in the field of the smart city and its subfield of smart governance. The key statement is that planning support systems (PSS) innovations and applications in urban planning should be closely related to the needs of users and planning practices. Then, authors from urban studies claim that there is a need to link smart city governance to the "urban issue," since knowledge cannot be simply gained through data-mining and ICT-based urban analytics. Then, the urban issue is produced by urban social processes which indicates a set of social relationships. For urban governance to become smart, the development of functionalities, applications, and ICTs in augmenting urban governance should be closely linked to urban issues (e.g., political, social, cultural, historical, and spatial issues) and support a smart urban governance in the service of local communities and ordinary people, rather than a small group of highly skilled experts. To respond to this, I argue that the mentioned perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at smart urban governance. Thus, this dissertation specifically focuses on how smart urban governance approach can be conceptualized and what role ICT could play in such governance. The conceptualization of smart urban governance responds to arguments that alternatives to corporate-led, technocratic smart governance should have "a solid epistemological and ontological understanding of the urban … and be more aware of how urban problems and their proposed smart solution are socially constructed" (Verrest and Pfeffer, 2019). It explores the role of the situated agents and their contribution to promoting a demand-driven smart governance. It also highlights a sociotechnical approach to ICT development and implementation. In other words, it is necessary to understand why smart technologies are designed, developed, and implemented as an appropriate answer to the perceived and constructed problems. Finally, smart urban governance highlights the importance of contextual factors for finding solutions to urban challenges.

AbstractThis paper presents a framework that provides guidelines on how information and communication technology (ICT) can create added value to smarten urban governance. Furthermore, the framework was applied to measure and interpret the added value of ICT functionalities for governance practice, based on an international questionnaire (268 respondents) and in‐depth expert interviews (12 experts). For improving governance processes and handling related urban problems, the results suggest that differentiated strategies should be employed. In this way, the use of ICT in smart planning can realize its full potential—and 'smartening' urban governance can be achieved in specific contexts.

Contextual factors have been consistently argued as influencing the usefulness of planning support systems (PSS). Whereas previous studies were mostly conducted within a single planning project or based on experimental workshops, the present study looked at the application of PSS in smart city projects worldwide, and investigated the extent to which subjectively measured contextual factors contribute to PSS usefulness in smart cities. Based on a recent international questionnaire (268 respondents) designed to gather the perceptions of scholars and practitioners in the smart city realm, an ordinal regression model was fitted to assess the associations between the argued contextual factors and PSS usefulness. The results show that, in general, four contextual factors—namely the characteristics of the technology itself, user characteristics, characteristics of the planning process, and political context—have a significant influence on the usefulness of PSS, and that their impacts vary significantly. This paper emphasizes that only when PSS users can identify the critical contextual factors that are favorable and unfavorable, will the potential benefits of PSS for spatial planning be fully achieved.

The implementation of smart governance in government policies and practices is criticised for its dominant focus on technology investments, which leads to a rather technocratic and corporate way of 'smartly' governing cities and less consideration of actual user needs. To help prevent a mismatch between the demand for and the supply of technology, this paper explores what smart governance can learn from efforts in debates on planning support systems to close the 'PSS implementation gap'. This gap refers to a long-standing discrepancy between the availability of planning support systems (supply) and the time-bound support needs of planning practice (demand). By exploring both the academic field of smart governance and the debates on the planning support system implementation gap, this paper contributes to the further development of smart governance by learning from the experiences in the planning support system debates. Two particular lessons are distilled: (1) for technology to be of added value to practice, it should be attuned to the wishes and capabilities of the intended users and to the specifics of the tasks to be accomplished, given the particularities of the context in which the technology is applied; and (2) closing the planning support system implementation gap reveals that knowledge on the context specificities is of utmost importance and will also be of importance to the smart governance developments. In conclusion, smart governance can and should become more aware of the role of contextual factors in collaboration with users and urban issues. This is expected to shift the emphasis from today's technology-focused, supply-driven smart governance development, to a socio-technical, application-pulled and demand-driven smart governance development.

This paper argues for a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance that we call "smart urban governance," which represents a move away from the technocratic way of governing cities often found in smart cities. A framework on smart urban governance is proposed on the basis of three intertwined key components, namely spatial, institutional, and technological components. To test the applicability of the framework, we conducted an international questionnaire survey on smart city projects. We then identified and discursively analyzed two smart city projects—Smart Nation Singapore and Helsinki Smart City—to illustrate how this framework works in practice. The questionnaire survey revealed that smart urban governance varies remarkably: As urban issues differ in different contexts, the governance modes and relevant ICT functionalities applied also differ considerably. Moreover, the case analysis indicates that a focus on substantive urban challenges helps to define appropriate modes of governance and develop dedicated technologies that can contribute to solving specific smart city challenges. The analyses of both cases highlight the importance of context (cultural, political, economic, etc.) in analyzing interactions between the components. In this, smart urban governance promotes a sociotechnical way of governing cities in the "smart" era by starting with the urban issue at stake, promoting demand-driven governance modes, and shaping technological intelligence more socially, given the specific context.

Over the past decade, two dominant perspectives prevail on the governance of smart cities. From a public administration perspective, 'smart governance' emphasizes the importance of technology-based tools in transforming government institutions. From an urban planning perspective, the governance of smart cities focuses on the institution interaction with spatial challenges. Within this backdrop, these perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at new transformative smart governance approaches. This paper proposes a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance, labeled as 'smart urban governance'. It is aiming specifically at the transformative governance of the socio-spatial context of urban challenges associated to smart cities via technological innovations and opening up new possibilities for city transformation. To this end, the meaning of smart urban governance is conceptualized from three dimensions: purposes, components and contexts. Based on a systematic literature review, these three dimensions are integrated into one holistic framework. A case illustration was applied to demonstrate the use and advantages of this framework. From this, this paper concludes that smart urban governance, by explicitly taking into account the specific socio-spatial context, can improve our understanding of the urban challenges associated to smart cities and contribute to its appropriate and 'smart' governance.