=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1234/paper-20
|storemode=property
|title=Urban Life Management: System Architecture Applied to the Conception and Monitoring
of Smart Cities
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1234/paper-20.pdf
|volume=Vol-1234
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/csdm/RochetV14
}}
==Urban Life Management: System Architecture Applied to the Conception and Monitoring
of Smart Cities==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1234/paper-20.pdf
Urban Lifecycle Management:
System Architecture Applied to the Conception and
Monitoring of Smart Cities
Claude Rochet 1, Florence Pinot de Villechenon 2
1
Professeur des universités
Aix Marseille Université
IMPGT AMU CERGAM EA 4225
ESCP Europe Paris
Claude.rochet@univ-amu.fr
2
Directeur CERALE Centre d'Etudes et de
Recherche Amérique latine Europe
ESCP Europe Paris
pinot@escpeurope.eu
Abstract: At date, there is no standardized definition of what a smart city is,
in spite many apply to propose a definition that fit with their offer, subsuming
the whole of the city in one of its functions (smart grid, smart mobility…).
Considering the smart cities as an ecosystem, that is to say a city that has
systemic autopoeitic properties that are more than the sum of its parts, we
develop an approach of modeling the smartness of the city. To understand how
the city may behave as a sustainable ecosystem, we need a framework to design
the interactions of the city subsystems. First we define a smart city as an
ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts, where sustainability is
maintained through the interactions of urban functions. Second, we present a
methodology to sustain the development over time of this ecosystem: Urban
Lifecycle Management. Third, we define the tasks to be carried out by an
integrator of the functions that constitute the smart city, we assume public
administration has to play this role. Fourth, we present what should be a smart
government for the smart city and the new capabilities to be developed.
1 Introduction
At date, there is no standardized definition of what a smart city is, in spite many apply
to propose a definition that fit with their offer, subsuming the whole of the city in one
of its functions (smart grid, smart mobility…). First we define a smart city as an
ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts, where sustainability is maintained
through the interactions of urban functions. Second, we present a methodology to
sustain the development over time of this ecosystem: Urban Lifecycle Management.
Third, we define the tasks to be carried out by an integrator of the functions that
constitute the smart city, we assume public administration has to play this role.
Fourth, we present what should be a smart government for the smart city and the new
capabilities to be developed.
This paper is based on case studies carried out within the cluster Advancity (France)
for the urban ecosystem issue, and other case studies on the intention to design new
business models based on the concept of extended enterprise and extended
administration. It relies on the state of the art in complex system architecture as
developed in information system and system engineering in complex products such as
aircrafts, to envisage how these competencies may be adapted to public services in
their collaborative work with private firms.
2 What is an urban ecosystem?
A smart city is more than the sum of “smarties” (smart grids, smart buildings, smart
computing…) but there is not, at the present time, a precise and operational definition
of what a smart city is (Lizaroiu & Roscia, 2012). Several pretenders exist on what a
smart city could be (Songdo in Korea, Masdar in Abu Dhabi,…) but they are not
cities to live in, they are demonstrators, propelled by big companies (e.g. Cisco in
Songdo) who apply a particular technology to the conception of a city.
In the literature, the smart city is recently defined as an ecosystem, that is to say a
system where the whole is more than the sum of the parts and has autopoeitic
properties (Neirotti et a., 2013).
For the systems architect this approach implies:
· Defining a perimeter that comprehends all the components that have a critical
impact on city life: the city needs to be fed, imports products that may have
been manufactured on a basis that does not fit with sustainable development
requirements (pollution, children work or underpaid workers, carbon
emissions…). These costs and environmental impact must be charged to the
city balance.
· Considering the system as a living system where the behavior of inhabitants
determines the sustainability of the ecosystemic properties of the city. The
underlying assumptions are material systems in addition to immaterial ones –
as history, culture, anthropology and social capital – play their role. A recent
trend in the literature on development economics, which is contrary to the fad
of mainstream economics that consider all territories alike, put the emphasis on
the “smart territory” as an unstructured cluster of tradition, culture, and
informal institutions able to shape an innovative milieu (Aydalot, 1986).
If the city is an ecosystem, according to the laws of general system theory (Ashby,
1962) it may be represented as shown in figure 1:
A) It has a finality made of strategic vision borne by stakeholders (public and
economic actors), people living in the city and sustaining this finality through
theirs activities, and preserves its identity by interactions with its environment.
B) This system may be broken down in tree structures of subsystems: the
functions. These functions belong to hard and soft domains. Hard domains
include energy, water, waste, transport, environment, buildings, and healthcare
infrastructures. Soft domains include education, welfare, social capital, public
administration, work, civic activity and economy. What makes the city
intelligent is the richness of connections between branches. We speak of a tree
structure here in the sense of Herbert Simon’s architecture of complex systems
(1969) where the designer will connect the subsystems to make the system
emerge according to the aim it pursues. In his seminal paper “a city is not a
tree” (1965) Christopher Alexander, an architect initially trained as
mathematician and Professor at Berkeley, criticized the conception of the
urban planning movement in America, considering it as a “fight against
complexity”, with no connections between branches. Modern cities conceived
for cars, compared to ancient cities, offer a very poor web of connections.
Alexander formalized his idea of the city conceived as a rich overlapping of
building blocks in his 1977 book A pattern language. This insight of
considering the whole as a combination of modular and reusable building
blocks lingered on the margins of architecture but has had an enormous
influence in the development of object oriented architecture in software
design.
C) These functions are operated using tools and artifacts of which end-users
are people, specialized workers and ordinary citizens. The critical point is that
people must not fit the tools but, on the contrary, tools and artifacts will fit to
people only if the right societal and institutional conditions are met.
Modeling the ecosystem implies answering three questions (Krob, 2009):
- The first question is WHY the city: what is the raison d’être and what are the
goals of the city regarding WHO are the stakeholders and which activities will
support it? Beginning with this question may avoid the drift towards a techno
pushed approach relying on technological determinism, one may find in
Songdo or Masdar.
- The question why is then deployed in questions WHAT: What are the
function the smart city must perform to reach these goals? These functions are
designed in processes grouped in subsystems aligned with the goal of the main
system.
- The third set of questions concern HOW these functions will be processed by
technical organs operated by the people who are the city executives and
employees, and the city dwellers as end users.
The issue is not to define an ideal type of smart city since all the “fitting conditions”
that make the city smart will be different according to the context, but to define
modeling rules to conceive and sustain the ecosystem.
A rationale for extended P.A. as a system
architect:
1- Strategic analysis
Why designing this ecosystem?
Who will live in the city?
What are its activities?
Conception, How the city will be fed?
metamodel Where the city is located ? (context)
framework, Why building a city & what
steering are the strategic goals?
Who are the stakeholders?
What are the functions to be performed to
reach the goals and how do they interact?
Subsystems What are the generic
and processes functions to be performed
by a smart city?
With which organs? With which smart
People Technical devices, people?
and tools software…
How people will interact with the
artifacts?
How civic life will organize?
With which organs
and resources?
9
13/07/2014
Figure 1.0: architecting the ecosystem
3 The global framework: Urban Lifecycle Management©
Since the advent of the “death of distance” with the revolution of transportation by the
middle of the XIX° century, the appearance of networks of infrastructure technologies
and the spread of the telegraph that transformed the government of the city, critical
obstacles to the growth of cities were removed. Today digital technologies amplify
this move, providing new tools such as smart phones that became a digital Swiss
knife that allows inhabitants to be active actors in the city life, communicating and
coordinating with each other, using and feeding databases. Doing this, digital
technologies may produce the best and the worst. The point is each city contains the
DNA of its own destruction. Smart cities digital infrastructure amplifies the
possibilities of manifestation of discontent, worsening the gap between have and
have-nots. Smart cities incur the risk to become the digital analogue of the Panopticon
Jeremy Bentham’s prison design (Townsend, 2013).
We assume that the rules of complex system modeling and system architecture may
apply to the city as well as they apply to products through PLM (Product Lifecycle
Management) in that case according to a framework we call Urban Lifecycle
Management© (ULM). The difference is a city never dies and must permanently
renew its economic and social fabric as well as its infrastructure. An unsmart city will
continuously expand according to the laws identified by G. West and L. Bettencourt
(2007) that reveal an increasing return in infrastructure investment that allow the city
to sprawl indefinitely. The complexity will grow out of control, resulting in a city
being the sum of heterogeneous boroughs with strong social and economic
heterogeneity and spatial dystrophy.
We define ULM first and foremost as a tool to design an ecosystem which will be
coherent with the political, social and economic goal people assign to the city
according to the principle of sustainable development: stability, waste recycling, low
energy consumption, and controlled scalability, but in a way that allows to foresee its
evolution and to monitor the transition in different ages of the city.
ULM has to counterweight the appeal of technological determinism: in the past,
technologies have always dwarfed their intended design and produced a lot of
unintended results. ULM has to monitor the life of the smart city alongside its
evolution, as represented in figure 2.0
- A city can’t be thought out of its historical and cultural context that is
represented by the territory of which the city is the expression. The smart city
embarks a strategic vision that is based on a strategic analysis of the context
and material and immaterial assets of the territory (GREMI, 1986). The
smartness of a city profoundly relies on what has been coined as “social
intelligence” by prof. Stevan Dedijer in the years 1970s as the capability to
A toolwhere
build consensus to design and
each social monitor
actor the ecosystem:
relies on others to create new
knowledge.ULM (Urban Lifecycle Management
Intelligence doesn’t operate in a vacuum but is ©)
socially and
culturally rooted (1984).
Socio political
Maturity of ecosystemic properties
cycle
City 2.0
Permanent
improvement
City 1.0 Sustainable
City 1.0
Gathering data and
Project understanding
management ecosystem Losing ecosystemic properties
Financial evolution Integrating
governance Evaluating, innovation
Technical correcting and
integration upgrading
Designing the
engineering Innovation Unlike a product or a
Functional
integration
ecosystem cycle company, a city never
Risk of collapse
From history, dies, even if not
social intelligence,
idea, to framework
Integrating off-the- sustainable (except in a
shelves innovation
case of collapse)
Development
13/07/2014
Figure 3.0: Urban Lifecycle Management©
- To be livable, the city may not be a prototype city: the system architect must
focus on the task of integration that needs to be reliable to proceed from off-
the-shelf components that already have an industrial life and may be
considered stable and reliable, in the same way the classical architect does not
invent the brick in the same time as he designs the house. This will imply
coordination between innovation cycles as we will see further.
- The process carried out on the principles represented in figure 1 leads to a
first release of the city 1.0 in case of a new city. Just as well in a new or old
city, we need to understand how the city lives and the unavoidable
discrepancies between intended design and real result, an observatory must be
implemented that will collect data produced by the city. Corrections are made
according to classical principles of quality process management.
- Alongside the lifecycle, exogenous innovation will occur that will need to be
endogenized by the model. For example, Songdo in his initial design relied on
RFID devices to track city dwellers. Today, smart phones have become the
Swiss knife of the city dwellers, rendering the use of RFID devices obsolete.
Innovation is ubiquitous in all subsystems of the city. Innovation in smart cars
interacts with the architecture of transportation (hard subsystem) as well as in
human behavior (soft subsystem). Coordination will be needed through
common frameworks such as projects management office extended to the
global smart city’s complexity.
- Innovation challenges the equilibrium of the smart city. Not all innovations
are compulsorily good for the city: Civic and political life have to evaluate the
consequences of an innovation and to frame it so that it fits with the common
good and the sustainability of the city.
- All along its lifecycle, the city may lose its smartness with two undesirable
consequences: the city may continue to sprawl on a non-sustainable basis
leading to today clogged cities. In case of a disruption in its core activity, the
city may collapsed as it happened in the past when things become too complex
to be monitored, as studied for past civilizations by archeologist Joseph Tainter
(1990). Reducing the size of the city is then the only solution to reduce the
complexity. A similar thing appears today in Detroit, a city that has lost its
goals and population, leading to the decision of reducing the size of the city as
the only means of avoiding bankruptcy. A similar pattern exists with the
Russian monocities.
4 The rationale for extended public administration in the process
of integration in ULM
No two cities are alike however smart they are, but the principles of system
architecture ULM are based on the assumption that common rules of modeling may
be defined. One of the key rules is to understand the interactions between economic
development and human capital: economic development is critical to draw financial
resources for investment in new transportations, infrastructures and education. Cities
with a greater economic development appear more attractive to people who wish to
increase their standard of life and who are more fitted to increase the smart cities
human capital. The more a smart city has a high level of human capital, the more she
has end users able to develop, test and use new tools that improve the quality of urban
life (Neirotti & a. 2014). It is all the more true in the digital era were the end-user is
not only a consumer but also a prod-user – according to the definition by sociologist
Axel Burns – who is involved in a continuing process of producing never finished
artifacts. On the other hand, the city has to take care to not create a digital divide.
The modeling rules consist of three main principles:
1. Strategic analysis: As represented in figure 1.0 the first task is to define the
issues with the stakeholders. The functions needed to reach these issues are
then defined, and deployed in organs and specific competencies and resources,
as represented in figure 3.0
2. Inventorying the building blocks: There is no absolute definition of what
is a smart city is and in spite we may define general rule of modeling, the
definition of the smartness of a city will always be specific to the context, e.g.
geographical and climate constraints (a city exposed to tropical floods or
earthquake will embark functions that a city in a temperate country won’t
need), economic activity (specialization, search for synergies, position on the
commercial routes and worldwide supply chains). The selection of these
functions is essential to build a resilient city, e. g. with the climate change new
phenomenon occur such as flood, marine submersion, extreme frost the city
was not prepared for.
Nevertheless, common functions will exist in every city and their organization
may proceed from off-the-shelf patterns.
Issues
Func9ons
Resources
Capabili9es
• Defining
“smartness”
and
• Work
• Energy
• The
New
Business
Models:
“sustainability”
• Budge9ng
• Water
• Public
• Wealth
crea9on
• Transporta9on
• Data
• Private
• Finance
and
taxes
• Feeding
• Digital
Systems
• Project
management
• Controlling
pollu9on
• Caring
• Tradi9ons
• Ins9tu9onal
arrangements
• Equilibrium
center
–
• Sociology
• The
day
to
day
decision
• Protec9ng
periphery
• Technologies
as
enablers
making
process
in
an
• Securing
• Migra9ons
and
enacters
evolu9onarry
perspec9ve
• Housing
policy
• Poverty
• Culture
and
tradi9ons
• Empowerment
• Educa9on
• Educa9on
• Ins9tu9ons
and
public
• Direct
democracy
• Leisure
• Health
organiza9ons
• Government
• Social
benefits
• Crime
• Process
modeling
• Governance
• Health
care
system
• Segrega9on
(social
and
• SoSware
• Project
management
spa9al)
• Migra9ons
control
• Tech
providers
• Social
innova9on
• Leisure
• Open
innova9on
• The
state
as
a
system
• Quality
of
life
engineer
• How
people
interact
with
• Mastering
ULM
people
and
ar9facts?
Figure 3.0: The building blocks
3. Integrating the ecosystem: In complex systems dynamics, the behavior
of a system as a whole is an emergence, that is to say that the property of the
system can’t be attributed to one function in particular but is the result of
interactions between these functions. The “good life” is the basic question of
political philosophy since Aristotle. It is an ethical issue that will result from
political and strategic debates among the stakeholders. Jane Jacobs (1995) has
criticized the utilitarian approach that prevailed in America in the city planning
movement. The ancestor of the urban planning movement, Ebenezer Howard,
thought of the smart city as an ideal city conceived from scratch as a mix of
country and city. His insight was to conceive the city as an interaction between
a city with jobs and opportunity but with pollution, and the countryside with
fresh air and cheap land but with fewer opportunities, each one acting as
magnets attracting and repelling people. He invented a third magnet, the
Garden city, which combined the most attractive elements of both city and
countryside (Howard, 1902). Garden city was the Songdo of its day
(Townsend 2013) that galvanized architects, engineers and social planners in
search of a rational and comprehensive approach of building city. Howard’s
approach was excoriated by Jane Jacobs in his Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1961) for not giving room to real life: “He conceived of good
planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all the
needed… He was uninterested in the aspects of the city that could not be
abstracted to serve his utopia”. In fact, the city garden dream, not relying on a
global systemic architecture, has degenerated in the banal reality of suburban
sprawl.
The same risk exists today with digital technologies, which could revive the
ideal city dream, under the impulse of the big players such as Cisco, IBM,
Siemens, GE who have interest in a top-down and deterministic approach that
reduce smart cities to the adoption of their “intelligent” technology. To avoid
this bias system architecture must be on the top of the agenda of extended
public administration. This activity may be summed up in four points:
a) Soft and hard subsystems: Today’s prototypes of would be smart cities are
techno pushed and put
emphasis on the possibilities of
technology to make the city
smart but mainly forget the
inhabitants. City dwellers have
the main role to play since it is
their behavior and their use
(and more and more the
production) of information and
technology that make the day to
day decisions that render the
ecosystem smart or no. Figure
4.0 represent both parts of the
ecosystem the soft or human
subsystem and the hard one,
the group of technical subsystems. Integration of these subsystems obeys
different laws: human subsystems are dissipative ones, difficult to model, not
obeying physical laws with important entropy. Reducing their uncertainty
relies on the sociology of uses, social consensus based on accepted formal and
informal institutions, and a close association of inhabitants to the design of the
system, which is a common feature of complex system design. Physical
subsystems are conservative ones that can be modeled through the laws of
physics with a possibility to reduce entropy, but keeping in mind that the
decider in last resort is the city dweller who will use it.
tem
Urban ecosys
Commercial
exchanges
SMART city Periphery
Territory
Food
City
Hard
Soft domains
domains
Government
Public services Health care Housing Work
Civic life Leisure Industry Transportation
Social
Education
Economy
integration Sanitation Waste recycling
Institutional
Social life
scaffolding Water Energy
13/07/2014 Claude Rochet - Florence Pinot 11
• Figure 4: The smart city as an emergence
b. Outside/inside: The urban ecosystem is not reducible to the city itself, with
perhaps the exceptions of city-states as Singapore where the limits of the city
are given by nature. A city must be fed and have exchanges with a close
periphery which produces goods (services, agriculture, food…) in interaction
with the center. The design of a system relies on the definition of the border of
the system. According to the laws of complex system modeling (Ashby law)
the inner complexity of a system must be appropriate to the complexity of its
environment. So, the urban ecosystem will have to define three perimeters: the
first is the city itself inside which the synergies and interactions are the
stronger and have the most “eco” properties. The second is the periphery: one
may refer here to the model defined by Thünen at the beginning of the XIX°
century representing the city with a succession of concentric rings going from
the highest increasing return activities at the center city to decreasing return
activities at the periphery (Schwarz, 2010). The first represents the exchanges
between the ecosystem and the rest of the country. This represents logistic
costs that may have a negative impact on pollution and carbon emission that
may be reincorporated in the balance of the city to measure it smartness. The
third is the external environment with witch the city exchanges, that is, in a age
of a globalized world, the rest of the world: the larger this perimeter, the more
the system is subject to external factors of instability and the less the
ecosystem is coherent as a Thünen zone1.
c. Combining top down and bottom-up integration: Each industry has today
its model for the integration of its activities. Smart grids, water suppliers,
transport operators, IT providers … have model for systemic integration of
their subsystem and to evaluate its impact on the global functioning of the city.
On the other hand, we know that the urban ecosystem being more than the sum
of the subsystems we need another approach that starts from the top, that is
from the strategic goals of the city deployed in functions as represented in
figure 1.0. Where will be the meeting point of these two approaches?
Proceeding bottom-up will raise problems of system interoperability, data
syntax and semantics, while the top-down approach is more relevant to define
strategic issues but will have to integrate all the existing businesses and
functions. A possibility is that storing data in common data warehouses and
completing it with the exploitation of big data will provide common
references. In any case, the answer will proceed from applied research projects
in building cities.
d. Defining new business models and competencies: Conceiving ecosystems
needs the enterprises to cooperate to share a common strategic view so as to
form a conception ecosystem based on the principle of “coopetition”
(cooperation and competition). Each enterprise must define its performance
indicators according to the performance of the whole and not only to that of its
parts. The same concern is for public management: with the silo organization
of public administration, no one is in charge of a global view of the city. This
calls for new business models of enterprises extended not only to the partners
of one enterprise but to the global value chain of the ecosystem. The same
applies to public administration in its very organization to develop the
competencies needed to deal with complex system design as well as its
strategic thinking. The French public administration still consider its industrial
strategy in terms of “filières” (channels) that are the vertical integration of
similar activities (such as aerospace, automotive…), as it was relevant in the
paradigm of mass production, while the locus of disruptive innovation is in the
overlaps of different industries.
The French government was baffled when GE announced his intention to take
over Alsthom. Would the French administration have understood the strategic
issues at stake with smart cities as ecosystem and not only with the hard
subsystems (water, sanitation, transportation…) where France has traditionally
1
We may give as an example the city of Quimper at the heart of the granitic massif of
Brittany (France) who choses to import its granite from China.
strong positions, she would have valued differently the smart grid activity of
Alsthom and its interest for competitors who aim to preempt the smart city
market which value is estimated, for the sole so-called smart infrastructures, at
100 billion USD for the coming decade (Townsend 2013)2.
Another strategic issue is the battle for norms: a smart city is not, at the present
time, defined with norms, metrics and metrology. Defining the norms (in terms
of ISO standards) will allow lock-in the conception of smart cities by shaping
all the tenders.
5 Smart government, the keystone of smart cities
Far as back as 1613, the Napolitano Antonio Serra, in a memoir presented at the vice-
king of Naples, analyzed the city as the place where activities with the biggest
increasing returns take place, with a strong correlation between economics and
politics (Reinert S., 2011). The frescoes of the Siena town hall by Ambroggio
Lorenzetti depict “the good government” as a dynamic equilibrium between intense
economic activities and an active political life that gives the people of citizens the
power to rule the city according to the principles of the common good. Contemporary
evolutionary economics correlates the evolution of institutions with that of economic
activity (Reinert E. 2012).
The growing complexity of cities and the predominance of top-down urban planning
have made us forgetful of these lessons from the past. In their analysis of present
smart cities initiative, Neirotti & a. (2013) notice that there is no practice that
encompasses all the domains, hard and soft, of the cities. On the contrary, the most
covered domains are hard ones: transportation and mobility, natural resources and
energy. Government is the domain in which the cities report the lowest number of
initiatives. More, there is an inverse correlation between investment in hard and soft
domains, and smart government is still the poor relative in smart cities initiatives and
cities that have invested in hard domains are not necessarily more livable cities. In
fact, two models emerge form Neirotti & a. survey: one focused on technology (with
a strong impetus of technology vendors) and one focused on soft aspects, the hard
model being dominant. The problem is there are no vendors for soft domains apart the
citizens themselves whereas systemic integration relies on soft domains, mainly
taking in account the context and valuing social capital.
Smart cities conceived as ecosystems should provide policy makers with some
practical guidelines to integrate soft and hard domains. Three areas for smart
government appear:
2
The total market of smart cities is estimated as much as $350 trillion needed to build,
maintain, and operate the world's cities over the next forty years (WWF report “Reinventing the
Cities”, 2012)
Economic development: In the past, smart cities have been built without central
planning (except in the case of Roman cities which reflected the imperial objective of
the Roman Empire) but with a clear, although not explicitly formulated, founding
purpose: defense, commerce, religion, power, geography… The pattern of the city
emerged out of the interactions of key stakeholders: The lord, the barons, the
merchants, the shopkeepers, the craftsmen, the bankers and the people. The design of
ancient cities made them intelligent since they were ecosystem that sustained and
reinvented themselves along time… till the point their capacity to self-reinvent came
to an end when the core of their strategic activity reached a tipping point (e.g Italian
cities after the Renaissance, Russian monocities from the USSR era, Detroit today).
The design of these cities obeyed to the real interactions underlying economic life
(roads, markets, fairs, harbors, work, industry…) and civic activities (agora, city hall,
structure of power). Their global ecosystem may be referred to as the ideal type
conceptualized by J.H Thünen at the beginning of the XIX° century, that is to say a
center where the core of the city is with the strongest interactions and the returns are
the highest, surrounded by concentric zones going of decreasing returns activities
(Schwarz, 2010).
The task of government is to search for the activities that produce the highest
increasing returns, no thanks to high technology but to synergies between activities
(Reinert, 2012), that will constitute the center of the Thünen zones. The Russian
monocities built on a unique industry (coal, oil, cars, aerospace….) linger as long as
this industry has a leading role but have very poor capabilities to reinvent itself due to
the lack of synergies between different economic activities.
A vibrant political life: With cities emerged political philosophy. The most
perspicacious analyst of what makes a city great was undoubtedly Machiavelli who
put emphasis on the necessity of the common good : “it is the common good and not
private gain that makes cities great » he wrote in his Discourse on Livy. Machiavelli
conceived the common good in the Thomas Aquinas’ tradition as a whole superior to
the sum of its parts. Its systemic equilibrium is permanently challenged by the
corruptive forces of fortuna that must be offset by the virtù of the Prince and the
dynamism of the vivere politico (Rochet, 2010). Emphasis has been put on the
topicality of Machiavelli to understand the systemic character of public management
(Rochet, 2009). The vitality of the system is sustained with permanent interactions
within thanks to a vibrant political life that provide a space for controversies.
Machiavelli praised the Roman republic for his institution of the tribunate that
managed the confrontation between the many of the citizens and the few of the ruling
class that allowed the Republic to upgrade his institutions according the principles of
the common weal advocated by Cicero. The conservative French politician and
historian François Guizot attributed the success of the European civilization to the
permanence of the classes struggle as a means to build political compromises as a
guarantee of sustainability, under the conditions that no class wins. In contemporary
complex societies, Elinor and Vincent Oström have developed the concept of
polycentric governance that is organizing governance on one hand on a vertical axis
from upper to lower levels of complexities, and on the other hand on an horizontal
axis which consists of overlappings between organizations (Östrom, 2010). Elinor and
Vincent Ostrom have criticized the excess of rationality that defines strict boundaries
within missions and attributions of public organizations, since the reality doesn’t
know these boundaries and the adaptive character of public systems may be found in
their overlaps.
Supporting open innovation: In the contemporary smart cities, information
technologies give more power than before to citizens to use and produce information,
and also applications. The experience of cities opening their database to the public to
trigger the development of apps has proved the payoff of bottom-up approaches: in
Washington DC, a contest “apps for democracy” challenged the local developers to
create software exploiting public resources. For a cost of 50 000 US$ the pay-off was
blazingly fast with forty seven apps developed in thirty days, representing an
estimated 2 million worth of services, about 4000% return on the city investment
(Townsend 2013).
But one should not conclude that bottom-up approaches are the killing solution:
theses apps are V 1.0 developed by techies on the basis of a fascination for
technologies while the city needs V 7.0 tested and reliable and based on the real needs
and problem solving of citizens as end-users not familiar with technology. We
rediscover here one of the law of innovation emphasized by Von Hippel (1986): the
key role of lead users in the innovation process which is furthermore not a specific
aspect of innovation in the digital era but a permanent, although forgotten, feature of
the innovation process in the industrial era as reminds us François Caron, a leading
academic in history of innovation (Caron, 2012).
In the same manner national innovation systems exist (Freeman, 1995) and provide a
framework that gives incentives to cooperation between industry, research and
investors to steer their activities toward risk taking innovations, extended public
administration could structure an urban innovation system that would structure the
innovation process in a way that would guarantee that innovation, research and
development of so-called smart apps are focused on the real needs of the city
dwellers.
6 Conclusion: Extended administration
as art of systemic integration
In the absence of a definition of how intelligent may be cities to be sustainable,
today’s initiatives are techno-pushed since tangible goods of the hard domains of
smart cities drive the market. Digital economy seems to be the keystone of smart
cities, but we have shown that the keystone in last resort is the end-users of
technologies: the citizens. This requires a combination between soft and hard domains
that can be achieved through complex systems architecture (Godfrey, 2012), a new
discipline, methodology and competency in public management that we coin as urban
lifecycle management©.
Although according to system theory self-regulating systems exist – but once their
genetic codes have been written - as they exist in nature and in small-scale human
system such as those studied by Elinor Östrom for the management of the commons
(Östrom, 1991), large complex systems such as smart cities need to be framed by a
central architect before reaching its resilient and sustainable stage. The newborn
concept of extended administration finds here its application in its intention to
encompass and to design the global value chain of public administration and its
interaction with – and between - all the stakeholders. This implies a sea change in the
competencies and business model of public administration. This new field would be
carried out through research in action projects building cities as ecosystem tending
toward resilience where humans are first to decide for the ends.
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