Social Emergence, Cornerstone of Smart City Governance as a Complex Citizen-Centric System

By Claude Rochet and Amine Belemlih

Chapter in Handbook of Smart Cities, published by Prof. Juan Carlos Augusto

We consider the smart city not as an addition of “smarties” (technological devices) but as a system capable of evolution all along its lifecycle, described as Urban Lifecycle Management (Rochet and Volle, L’intelligence iconomique, les nouveaux modèles d’affaires de la III° revolution industrielle, De Boeck Supérieur, Louvain, 2015) since a city never dies and must be able to reconfigure itself while its internal and external environment changes. The literature on cities as evolving ecosystems (Batty, I/S: J Law Policy Inf Soc 11(1):127–151, 2015) considers this evolutionary process cannot be steered in a top down way, either by a supra rational actor or on a self-regulating basis as claimed by the authors of the first order cybernetics. By integrating all the developments around citizen-centric smart cities, we propose a complex system and social emergence lens to better understand the process of emergence of “bottom-up” dynamics within local communities leading to socially smart cities.