Social And Civil Stakeholder Group

Smart Cities require innovative governance approaches to facilitate the increasingly self-initiating civil society and to exploit the potential of ICT. City policy-makers need to revisit the approaches they adopted to combat urbanization challenges. Traditionally, the provision of urban infrastructure and services to meet people's basic needs, local economic development and environmental protection has been the exclusive province of the public sector. But Urbanization dynamics have evolved over time and call for a transition to a more collaborative approach enabling the private sector, civil society and academia to participate and be a partner in bringing about the desired transformation. This calls for new roles, new skills, new cooperation and new policy models.The participants in the VRT are key note representatives of two major European networks (Eurocities(1), Urban Europe Stakeholder Involvement Platform(2)). Main findings in this VRT refers to the fact that there is not one transition pathway towards sustainable development and that cities need to drive towards a more open and experimental approach as well as innovation does not only manifest in urban infrastructure but also requires changes in urban governance!