In the case of a self-organizing system, the joint activity of components (e.g. people) ‘generates a field’ that guides their behavior in a distributed manner not mediated by centralized processing. In the case of a self-governing system, information distributed throughout the components is being collected, processed, and stored in a context-independent format, allowing the system to be more flexible in its choice of means. The extra layer of collecting, processing, and storing information distinguishes a self-governing system from a self-organizing (Ismael 2011). Put simply, a self-governing system acts like an aware and informed actor reacting to external signals according to its experience, goals, beliefs, etc. In contrast, a self-organizing system reacts on occurring stimuli in a predetermined and predictable way.
Denters (2012) claims that a community initiative is a mode of public governance based on principles of self-governance. Based on his definition, we define community self-governance as a collective activity initiated by either (1) a local government or citizens where citizens (2) actively participate in a project implementation and (3) have decision making power about its means and ends (4) for the common good. This simple but comprehensive definition contains actors (1), an overall goal (4), and a method for achieving it (2, 3). Generally, the common interest of citizens is improvement of the quality of life. Jacobs (1993) argues that quality of life is closely linked to the ability of a community to self-determine its conditions of everyday life. As was discussed earlier in the chapter, one of the dimensions of smart city development is the institutional dimension, which stresses citizen-driven
government (Nam and Pardo 2011a). Therefore, possible self-governance models are particularly interesting in the context of smart city development.Citizen empowerment can be seen as a top-down approach to community self-governance. A government can empower citizens by designing appropriate policies that foster self-governance initiatives. The Dutch case of ‘social initiatives’ may serve as an example of an empowering role of a government (Kleinhans 2017). A
bottom-up approach means that grassroots initiatives are launched by local communities, NGOs or activists. An example here are the grassroots actions by citizens in San Francisco towards a more pedestrian-friendly urban environment (Pagano 2013, more details in Sect. 4).A prosperous smart city can be built utilizing a top-down or-bottom-up approach but only with active involvement of various stakeholders. “United efforts create synergy, which allows individual projects to build upon each other for faster progress, resulting in the involved, informed and trained critical mass necessary for the transformation of how the entire community carries out its work” (Nam and Pardo 2011a, p. 287). Therefore, community self-governance projects should not necessarily be initiated by a community itself; a local administration can play facilitating or enabling role for citizen initiatives. In our view, self-governance is undeservedly neglected layer in smart cities and has central role in the smart city concept bridging together people, technologies, and policies.
S. Zhilin et al. (2019). Community self-governance in the smart
city: Towards a typology. § 2.3. E-Participation in Smart Cities: Technologies and Models of Governance for Citizen Engagement, pp. 81-98.