Visualising and Measuring Public Values in Smart Cities. A Collaborative Governance Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of creators and users regarding the visualization and measurement of public values created by smart cities. We build an analytical framework using the collaborative governance and public value theories to show how smart city creators and users perceive the visualization and measurement of multiple values. We applied photo-elicitation interviews with 40 city creators and city users, and used visual sources created by the researchers. The photographs were used to expand the ideas about capturing value from various smart city projects. We analyzed public value from an economic, societal, and environmental perspective and found that public value perceived by city creators is not always aligned with city users. While we found general agreement in relation to environmental values, in the case of social and economic value, the perceptions of smart city users diverge from the those of smart city creators. We also found that the multi-actor reality and in-group pressures may influence the lack of a coherent vision of smart cities among the creators, which results in relatively lower fulfillment of users’ expectations. This paper explores how the combination of different interests, actors and values affect performance measurement in a certain reality of smart city initiatives in Poland.