UrbanData2Decide

The rise and spread of new technologies lead to significant societal changes and is characterised by exponential dynamics. New trends and developments touch upon the relationship between technology and society and have created new needs and requirements. These eminent potentials of the Internet have led scholars to label these technological innovations an emerging “Fifth Estate”.4 While the mass media and the press are the traditional Fourth Estate of every democratic system, providing important functions of control and trustful information, the Internet enables novel forms of democratic accountability and voice to thrive. This is especially important on the level of urban governance where new modes of democracy and participatory can be elaborated and tested. New technologies may provide important tools and solutions to foster this process.
But these new technologies are not only a catalyst for new social developments but also represent an additional information channel for political decision makers. In fact it must be an important step in this process of developing and using the potentials of the Fifth Estate to provide interfaces between city governments and the existing information and data pools of the internet.
It is especially in the local context of cities and municipalities that these potentials of new technologies will be of great use. While the concept of Smart Cities has highlighted the various aspects of how cities and city management can profit from the usage of new technologies, the aspect of urban governance and urban decision support hasn’t seen the attention it deserves so far. Additionally, it has been highlighted how smart solutions aren’t taken up by cities automatically but require strategic support and learning opportunities.5
Together this poses a serious challenge for the development of new approaches that fully can exploit this new potential and that deliver flexible and sustainable models towards new solutions of urban governance. Such an approach has to bring together three separated branches that have been discussed in the context of modern urban governance but so far have not been combined to an integrated and comprehensive method.