Digitizing Urban Governance: Understanding the transformation in a mid-size American city

Abstract

Dissertation Advisor: Professor Antoine Picon Mojdeh Mahdavi

ABSTRACT Digitizing urban governance: Understanding the transformation in a mid-size American city

This dissertation explores the digital transformation of urban governance, the city and its governing institutions, and its dynamic relationship with urban restructuring and economic development. As digital transformation policies expand in the political agendas of local governments of various sizes and socioeconomic backgrounds, the in-depth and up-close study of existing smart cities becomes critical to understand, challenge, and improve this policy instrument. The dissertation asks: how path-dependent is the digital transformation of governance in a mid-size American city? To set the analytical framework for the empirical inquiry, the research asks what policymaking context mainstreams digital governance institutions and whether digital governance is a new governance model or the continuation of existing models through new technological tools. In Syracuse, NY, a mid-size and post-industrial city, which serves as the contextual focus of this research, the digital transformation policy agenda is instrumentalized to reverse the urban and economic decline through Syracuse Surge, the city’s strategic plan for the growth in the New Economy. This research is enacted through four main lines of inquiry: first, investigating how digital transformation policy responded to the complexity of coordinating operationally autonomous yet systematically inter-dependent networks of individuals and organizations in a rapidly changing environment. Second, identifying actors, the symbolic media of communication such as money, law, and knowledge they use, and its efficiencies to create a shared agenda to advance urban governance transformation. Third, tracing moments of disjuncture that happen through accidents, errors, and disruptions due to the immaturity of the technological tools and methods and insufficiency of infrastructural and implementational capacity. And fourth, grounding the smart city spaces of visibility and related urban revitalization projects to pinpoint the change in intra-urban geographies of uneven development within capitalist production processes. The investigation brings together perspectives and methods from political science, critical governance and policy studies, and urban studies to bear upon some of the most pressing issues facing local governments and their constituents as cities transition towards emerging paradigms of digital transformation. The main finding is that the utopian rhetoric of the project did not correspond with the reality due to the lack of resources, problematic national regulations, organizational readiness, and co-ordination problems among multiple stakeholders and expectations. Therefore, the implementation of the policy agenda is highly context-specific and path-dependent. At the theoretical level, the research finds that even though the extant political and economic policymaking conditions have not changed, multiple interdependent actors, perspectives, and resources involved in the digital transformation policy agenda negotiation and implementation have changed the organizational settings and governing techniques. I conclude that the heterarchic urban governance that foregrounds and is forged by the instrumentalization of the digital transformation policy agenda captures the current changes in urban governance.