Urban governance and new ICTs: e-democracy in two European cities

The rise of the information society has entailed a number of fundamental changes that affect economy, policy and social structure. Many of these changes manifest themselves in cities. The resulting development and application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has changed the way of thinking and managing the cities government. They have actually changed the way of seeing the organization of public life of city centers and, most importantly, the relationship between citizens and institutions. The topic of this study is the application of ICTs within the urban governance processes. In detail, the paper describes and analyses the implementation and manifestation of e-democracy processes in two European urban contexts: Turin and Stockholm. Taking distance from technological determinism, the theoretical elaboration, preceding the empiric study, shares the vision according to which technology does not produce innovation by itself: social processes do create it, appropriating technological means. Therefore, it emerges that innovation, in the practice of e-democracy, consists of the ways actors interact, instead of being determined by the mere use of ICTs. Processes of edemocracy tend to produce larger forms of participation and interaction, and so to change the relationship between private and public actors. Given this new kind of relationships, those processes can become an efficient instrument to improve cities governance. The observation, during the field work phase of the research, emphasizes some significant distinctions between the two experiences inquired, due to their cultural and institutional peculiarities, the particular policies applied, and the different ways of implementation of the processes. From this analysis, you can easily individuate the problem, especially for the Italian context, in the lack of public habits of practicing e-democracy. In conclusion, this study sets the crucial problem in civic customs and political actions consolidated in each context. Technological processes do not produce by themselves more participation of citizens. According to this vision, the mere use of technology is not sufficient without a strong social demand, on the contrary in some cases it risks to reserve important parts of the decision-making processes to few “technocratic élites”.