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Masters Thesis in collaboration with Sanaz Mirzaei completed at the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy, December, 2010.
Citation preview
Reconfiguring Governance Networks through the Implementation of Digital Telecommunications
Technologies to Meet the Needs of Changing Metropolises
NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
MATTHEW ARANCIO SANAZ MIRZAEI
NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
Politecnico di Milano
Faculty of Architecture and Society
Department of Urban Planning and Policy Design
Professor Alessandro Balducci
Matthew Arancio / 736641
Sanaz Mirzaei / 737568
December 2010
Reconfiguring Governance Networks through the Implementation of Digital Telecommunications
Technologies to Meet the Needs of Changing Metropolises
ii THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
TABLE OF CONTENTS ii
CHAPTER 1: THESIS PRESENTATION AND FORWARD
1.1 Introduction 2
1.2 Premise 2
1.3 Methodology 3
1.4 Organization 3
1.5 Case Explorations 4
1.5.1 Policy Case Exploration 5
1.5.2 Project Case Exploration 5
1.6 Policy and Project Recommendations 5
1.7 Preliminary Conclusions 6
1.8 Forward 6
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA
2.1 Introduction 10
2.2 The Socio-Spatial Dialectic 10
2.3 Capital and Urban Socio-Spatial Organization 11
2.4 The Fordist Era 12
2.5 The Monocentric City 13
2.6 Socio-Economic Transition and the Emergence of the Global Era 13
2.7 The Post-Fordist Era 14
2.8 Polycentric Cities and Urban Regions 15
2.8.1 the City Region 17
2.8.2 the Megacity Region 17
2.8.3 Network City 17
2.9 Network Society 17
2.10 Capital and Cities in the Information Age: The Issue of Boundaries 20
2.11 The Scalar Dilemma For Governance 23
2.12 Forward 24
CHAPTER 3: WHITHER METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE?
3.1 Introduction 28
3.2 Metropolitan Governance and Urban Systems 28
3.3 Metropolitan Government and Governance: An Overview 30
i i iTABLE OF CONTENTS
3.4 Localist Interests and the Rebuttal to Metropolitan Government 32
3.5 New Regionalism: Localized Regionalism? 33
3.6 Institutional Fragmentation: The Problem at Hand 34
3.7 Research Conclusions 35
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE
4.1 Introduction 40
4.2 Thesis Hypothesis 40
4.3 Metropolitan Planning Strategy for Fragmented Contexts 41
4.3.1 Regional Coordination, Local Projects 41
4.3.2 Population Oriented Services 42
4.4 Digital Telecommunications Technologies as Boundary Objects 43
4.5 Digital Telecommunications Technologies and Shifts in Urban
Regional Governance Network Development 44
4.6 Digital Telecommunications Technologies and Urban Regional Governance Networks 45
4.7 Digital Telecommunications Technologies and Shifting Dialogues in Urban Regional
Governance Networks 46
4.8 Digital Telecommunications Technologies and Urban Regional Governance Networks Project 48
4.8.1 Network Installation 48
4.8.2 Network Servicing 49
4.8.3Network Regulation 49
4.8.4 Network Projects Summary 50
4.9 Conclusion 50
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION
5.1 Introduction 54
5.2 Case Explorations 54
5.3 PITER Introduction 55
5.4 Emilia Romagna: Contextual Overview 55
5.5 Piano Telematico di Emilia Romagna 59
5.5.1 Regional Collaboration and Coordination 60
5.5.2 Local Initiative 61
5.5.2.1 E-Governance 61
5.5.2.2 WIFI Provision 63
5.5.2.3 Regulation 65
5.5.2.4 Connectivity Space 67
5.5.3 Actor Exchange 68
iv THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
5.6 PITER Case Conclusion 69
5.7 UC@MITO Case Introduction 70
5.8 UC@MITO Contextual Overview 71
5.8.1 Urban Computing 71
5.8.2 Milan and Turin 72
5.9 Where A Mi?/ Where TO? 73
5.9.1 Concept and System 73
5.9.1.1 Hardware 74
5.9.1.2 Software 74
5.9.1.3 Space 76
5.9.2 UC@MITO Project Development and Strategies Lessons 76
5.9.2.1 E-Governance 76
5.9.2.2 Wifi Provision 85
5.9.2.3 Regulation Strategies 85
5.9.2.4 Connectivity Space 85
5.10 UC@MITO Conclusion 87
5.11 Case Conclusions 87
5.12 Policy Recommendations 89
5.13 Conclusion 90
CHAPTER 6: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES: UNITED STATES CONTEXT OVERVIEW
6.1 Introduction 94
6.2 Policy Suggestions 94
6.3 The United States and Metropolitan Planning Experiences 94
6.3.1 Past and Present 95
6.3.2 Failures and Opportunities 96
6.4 The United States and Urban Digital Telecommunications Policy 97
6.4.1 Current Situation 97
6.4.2 Failure of Digital Telecommunications Connectivity Policy 98
6.5 Conclusion and Forward 99
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES
7.1 Introduction 102
7.2 United States Studies for Policy Recommendation 102
7.3 New York City Region 104
7.3.1 New York Metropolitan Governance 106
7.3.2 New York City Region and Digital Telecommunications Policy 108
vTABLE OF CONTENTS
7.3.2.1 New York State Broadband Strategy Roadmap 108
7.3.2.2 Connected City 108
7.3.2.3 City Departments 109
7.3.3 Conclusion: New York City Region Policy Issues 110
7.4 Portland Region 113
7.4.1 Portland Governance 113
7.4.1.1 Metro Regional Framework Plan 114
7.4.1.2 Urban Growth Boundary 116
7.4.1.3 The Comp Plan 116
7.4.2 Portland Region and Digital Telecommunications Policy 116
7.4.2.1 The Bureau of Technology 116
7.4.2.2 Portland Online (The Portland Plan) 117
7.4.2.3 Portland Maps 118
7.4.2.4 VisionPDX 118
7.4.3 Conclusion: Portland Policy Issues 119
7.5 Policy Recommendations 120
7.5.1 Network Governance Structure 120
7.5.2 Recommendations 121
7.5.2.1 Metropolitan Planning Organizations 121
7.5.2.2 Public Spatial Projects and Connectivity 122
7.5.2.3 Policy Based on Populations 123
7.6 Conclusion 124
CHAPTER 8: THESIS CONCLUSION
8.1 Concluding Remarks 128
8.2 Research Conclusions 128
8.3 Project Conclusions 129
8.4 Policy Recommendation Conclusions 130
8.5 Final Remarks 131
BIBLIOGRAPHY 134
APPENDICES 142
A) Interview Summaries 142
B) UC@MITO User and Stakeholder Analysis Tables 146
C) ConnecToMi Pilot Project Proposal 148
vi THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
LIST OF FIGURES
CHAPTER 2
Figure 2-1 ; pg 13; a schematic image depicting a monocentric city region
Figure 2-2 ; pg 15; a schematic image depicting a polycentric city region
Figure 2-3 ; pg 16; a diagram schematically representing different permutations of monocentric and polycentric
city regions
Figure 2-4 ; pg 18; schemes indicating the socio-spatial impacts of digital telecommunications technologies
Figure 2-5 ; pg 19; a chart representing new forms of collaboration and coordination in network societies
Figure 2-6 ; pg 22; a historic map depicting the positions of telegraph cables
Figure 2-7; pg 22; a map of world digital teleconnectivity traffic
Figure 2-8; pg 22; a map of North American digital teleconnectivity traffic
Figure 2-9; pg 22; a map of European digital teleconnectivity traffic
CHAPTER 3
Figure 3-1 ; pg 29; a schematic depiction of the role of infrastructure in the growth and development of urban
regions, adapted from the works of Pinzon Cortes entitled Mapping Urban For Morphology: Studies in the
Contemporary Urban Landscape, TU Delft, 2009.
Figure 3-2 ; pg 30; a schematic representation of the urban regions showing superimposed ayers of urbanized
space, government boundaries and infrastructure
CHAPTER 4
Figure 4-1 ; pg 41 ; a schematic representation of the integration of regional coordination with locally articulated
projects
Figure 4-2 ; pg 43 ; a schematic representation of the role of the movement of populations in redefining
governance network boundaries
Figure 4-3 ; pg 44 ; a schematic representation of knowledge transfer in a boundary object scenario
Figure 4-4 ; pg 47 ; a schematic representation of the transition of urban governance networks from systems of
hierarchy to networks
CHAPTER 5
Figure 5-1 ; pg 57 ; a map of the Emilia Romagna region
Figure 5-2 ; pg 58 ; a photograph of Bologna’s portici
vi iLIST OF FIGURES
Figure 5-3 ; pg 61 ; a map showing the expanse of Lepida SpA’s DSL cable network in Emilia Romagna
Figure 5-4 ; pg 64 ; a schematic representation of the macchia di leopardo approach to wireless service
provision implemented in Bologna and a schematic representation of the complete coverage
approach to wireless service provision implemented in Reggio Emilia
Figure 5-5 ; pg 66 ; a schematic representation of the authentication approach to wireless service provision
implemented in Reggio Emilia and Bologna
Figure 5-6 ; pg 67 ; Bologna’s Sala Borsa Urban Center
Figure 5-7 ; pg 68 ; a photograph of a wireless hotspot bench in Reggio Emilia
Figure 5-8 ; pg 72 ; a schematic representation of the dynamics of urban computing adapted from the original
KickOff Presntation of the UC@MITO project
Figure 5-9 ; pg 74 ; a schematic representation of wireless hotspot hardware configuration
Figure 5-10 ; pg 75 ; a schematic representation of Where A Mi?/ Where TO? software system
Figure 5-11 ; pg 77 ; map showing the hypothetical distribution of hotspots in the city of Milan
Figure 5-12 ; pg 79 ; a visual representation of a “quickstop”
Figure 5-13 ; pg 80 ; a moodboard representation of a quickstop
Figure 5-14 ; pg 81 ; a visual representation of a “bustop”
Figure 5-15 ; pg 82 ; a moodboard representation of a “bustop”
Figure 5-16 ; pg 83 ; a visual representation of a “cube”
Figure 5-17 ; pg 84 ; a moodboard representation of a “cube”
Figure 5-18 ; pg 86 ; a schematic reprsentation of Where A Mi? / Where TO’s authentication federation approach
Figure 5-19 / Figure 5-20 ; pg 88 ; maps showing the spatial situation of the elements of the Where A MI/
Where TO system and their close relation to the existing infrastructure network and uses of the
spacein Milan and Turin
CHAPTER 7
Figure 7-1 ; pg 105 ; a photograph of New York City posted on Flickr.
Figure 7-2 ; pg 106 ; an image depicting the location of the New York Metropolitan Area in four different states
Figure 7-3 ; pg 106 ; an image depicting the location of the New York Metropolitan Area in the context of the
counties of the state of New York
Figure 7-4 ; pg 107 ; an image depicting the New York Metropolitan Area and urbanized areas
Figure 7-5 ; pg 112 ; a photograph of downtown Portland, OR posted on Flickr by David GN Photography.
Figure 7-6 ; pg 114 ; an image depicting the location of the Portland Metropolitan Area in two different states
Figure 7-7 ; pg 114 ; an image depicting the location of the Portland Metropolitan Area in the context of the
counties of the state of Oregon
Figure 7-8 ; pg 115 ; an image depicting the Portland Metropolitan Area and urbanized areas
Figure 7-9 ; pg 120 ; a figure redepicting a policy strategy architecture for the regional coordination but local
articulation of network
x THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
THESIS SUMMARY
Urban form is the amalgamation of a web of social activity, a spatial manifestation of
human ingenuity and ambition, a place of gathering and collective meaning and a place of
flux and almost constant evolution. Our society is quickly changing into a network society.
Cities and urban systems at once are growing upward, becoming forums of intensified
information exchange, growing outward, drawing more and more upon regional resources
and markets to satiate the competitive erg of an intensified and hyper connected global
economy, and are increasingly juxtaposing international and local movement of people,
goods and information. As growth and development has led to the emergence of dense
networks of globally connected urban regions, urban governments remain frozen in time,
relics of past understanding of how to govern and how to organize urban systems. As
cities have expanded well beyond conventional geographic boundaries and delineations
of such government institutions, actors are left to respond with antiquated tools in an
otherwise more challenging and complex socio-cultural context.
This thesis is a study of functional mismatches between urban spatial and social
systems. This thesis is also an exploration of providing strategies to mitigate functional
mismatches with new policy tools. The thesis begins with the premise that fragmentation
of urban governance networks is in large part attributed to the inability of these networks
to tackle regional coordination problems because of local boundary constraints. The
resulting mismatch between urban governance capacity to engage larger scale urban
systems requires new forms of creative collaboration, to fill service provision gaps. Digital
and telecommunications technologies, their installation and their use to produce public
services at the city and regional level is proposed as means not only to activate dialogues
and collaboration between actors in a given network, but also to change cultures of
collaboration. Learning to work together initially, then communicating and collaborating
xiTHESIS SUMMARY
more rapidly through an increase in the quality of connections will serve to mitigate the
“mismatch” of urban governance service provision at the regional level as actors will
shift and adopt new roles to adjust and fully take advantage of technological change.
Discussions of strategies to mitigate mismatch in metropolitan areas will be applied
to two United States cities, New York and Portland, for further theoretical development
application.
xii THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS
RIASSUNTO DI TESI
La forma urbana è la fusione di una complessa rete di attività individuali e istituzionali,
una manifestazione spaziale di ingegno umano e ambizione, un luogo di incontro e di
senso collettivo e un luogo di cambiamento continuo e in quasi costante evoluzione. Tale
complessa attività è informata, strutturata da condizioni socio-culturali e di innovazione
tecnologica, ed è una sovrapposizione apparente di risultati conseguiti in passato e
proiettati verso desideri futuri.
La nostra società sta cambiando; alla luce delle conquiste tecnologiche con una
conseguente maggiore rapidità di connessione e dallo scambio di informazioni in gran
parte attribuibile allo sviluppo di Internet, lo sono anche gli spazi in cui viviamo. Le città ed
i sistemi urbani allo stesso tempo, si stanno sviluppando, diventando forum di scambio
di informazioni intensificato e crescente verso l’esterno, attingendo sempre più risorse
dal loro hinterland per saziare l’intensificarsi della competitività del mercato globale.
Le nostre istituzioni, tuttavia, rimangono congelate nel tempo, reliquie di costrutti sociali
di una comprensione del passato come governare e di come organizzare il tumulto
costante di attività urbane. Mentre la città si è evoluta in una forma più complessa,
espandendosi ben oltre i confini geografici e tradizionali delimitazioni delle istituzioni
ormai antiquate, l’attività di governo è lasciata al cavarsela con strumenti troppo vecchio
in un contesto di governante altrimenti più impegnatovi e complessi.
Questa tesi è una presentazione dell’evoluzione degli spazi urbani e dei sistemi di
governante istituiti per organizzarle. Si aprirà quindi una discussione sulla forma antiquata
e inadeguata delle istituzioni di governo per affrontare i più complessi problem urbani
regionali. Infine, la tesi proporrà una nuova strategia per inquadrare il trattamento degli
xi i iTHESIS SUMMARY
spazi urbani, attraverso l’implementazione di tecnologie delle telecomunicazioni digitali,
per promuovere nuove forme di collaborazione intergiurisdizionale nelle regioni urbane
e rompere la frammentazione della governance istituzionale, concentrandosi sulla
creazione di nuovi dialoghi tra le istituzioni e la città funzionale.
FORCE-LES DE BÂTIR ENSEMBLE UNE TOUR ET TU LES CHANGERAS EN
FRÈRES. MAIS, SI TU VEUX QU’ILS SE HÂTENT, JETTE LEUR DU GRAIN.
Force them to build a tower together and you will make them brothers. However, if
you want them to hurry, make sure to throw them some bread.
CITADELLE
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS2
them. It will then open a discussion of the antiquated
and inadequate form of governance institutions to deal
with more complex urban regional problems. Finally, it
will propose a new strategy for framing the treatment
of urban spaces through the implementation of digital
telecommunications technologies to promote new forms
of cross-jurisdictional collaboration in urban regions and
break institutional governance fragmentation, focusing on
creating new dialogues between the institutional and the
functional city.
1.2 PREMISE
This thesis is a study of functional mismatches. It begins
with the premise that fragmentation of urban governance
networks is in large part attributed to the inability of
these networks to tackle regional coordination problems
because of local boundary constraints. The resulting
mismatch between urban governance capacity to engage
larger scale urban systems requires new forms of creative
collaboration, not just new layers of government, to fill
service provision gaps. Digital and telecommunications
technologies, their installation and their use to produce
public services at the city and regional level is proposed
as means not only to activate dialogues and collaboration
between actors in a given network, but also to change
cultures of collaboration during the initial phases of
installation. Learning to work together initially, then
communicating and collaborating more rapidly through an
increase in the quality of connections will serve to mitigate
the “mismatch” of urban governance service provision at
the regional level as actors will shift and adopt new roles to
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Urban form is the amalgamation of a complex web of
individual and institutional activity, a spatial manifestation
of human ingenuity and ambition, a place of gathering
and collective meaning and a place of flux and almost
constant evolution. Such complex activity is informed and
structured by socio-cultural conditions and technological
innovation, and is a seeming superimposition of past
achievements and a projection of future desires.
Our society is changing; in light of the technological
achievements spurned by an increased rapidity of
connection and information exchange attributed in large
part to the development of the Internet, so too are the
spaces in which we live. Cities and urban systems are at
once growing upward, becoming forums of intensified
information exchange and growing outward, drawing more
and more upon resources from their hinterlands to satiate
the competitive erg of an intensified global market.
Our institutions, however, remain frozen in time, relics
of societal constructs of a past understanding of how to
govern and how to organize the constant tumult of urban
activity. As the city has evolved into a more complex
form, expanding well beyond conventional geographic
boundaries and delineations of antiquated institutions,
governance activity is left to muddle through with
antiquated tools in an otherwise more challenging and
complex governance context.
This thesis is a presentation of the evolution of urban
spaces and the governance systems instituted to organize
CHAPTER 1 : THESIS PRESENTATION AND FORWARD 3
governance collaboration and networking, the project,
entitled UC@MITO instead focused on the e-governance
interface between urban populations and emerging
regional governance networks.
Finally, policy recommendations deriving from observations
during initial research and ongoing project experience were
generated. These policy recommendations were generated
with the conviction of applying lessons learned in a foreign
context. Through the application of theory in a real world
scenario project scenario, strengths and weaknesses of
the project and lessons learned during the course of the
thesis and project work could then be reapplied in the
United States.
1.4 ORGANIZATION
This first chapter of this thesis is a summary and
organizational presentation of work accomplished.
Part I of this thesis, encompassing Chapters Two and
Three, will depict the influence of societal evolution on
spatial organization.
The second chapter of this thesis will be dedicated to a
charting and understanding the evolutionary trend and
nexus between space and society, providing evidence
that societal changes shape urban spatial forms and
governance patterns and vice versa. The geographic theory
of the “socio-spatial dialectic” will provide a theoretical
framework in which the evolutionary trends of urban spaces
and systems can be charted and organized. It will focus
on depicting and discussing the changes urban spaces
and urban governance networks are currently undergoing
in light of the introduction and development of digital
telecommunications technologies. This part of the thesis
will present a general depiction of the cultural and spatial
evolution of modern cities from the Fordist Era to today.
The section will focus on the present and the changes
induced by the adoption of digital telecommunications
adjust and fully take advantage of technological change.
1.3 METHODOLOGY
This thesis is an amalgamation of research and practice
and draws information regarding the proposed hypothesis
on breaking trends in urban regional institutional and
functional system mismatch from a number of sources.
The thesis began with a research survey of ongoing issues
in the realm of metropolitan planning, cross-jurisdictional
collaboration and digital telecommunications technology
adoption and application. This research survey took the
form of a review of relevant literature in the studies of the
evolution of urban spaces, the evolution of metropolitan
governance, metropolitan governance fragmentation and
finally the social dynamics of technological innovation was
compiled.
Scholarly research was complimented by interviews with
public administration actors in the Emilia Romagna
region of Italy currently engaged in the implementation
of regional digital telecommunications plan. Six interviews
were conducted with actors at the regional level, city
administrative levels in Bologna and Reggio Emilia, and
finally with regional Internet service providers and multi-
utilities. Interviews were used to grasp the panorama of
digital telecommunications policy debate and understand
evolutionary trends induced by policy application in
regional governance networks.
Information from interviews as processed and generated
a case study in regional implementation of digital
telecommunications plans. A second case study was
drawn from ongoing project work. This project, which was
developed during the course of a two-year honors project
known as the Alta Scuola Politecnica, challenged the
writers of this thesis to collaborate in a group work setting
whilst applying ongoing theoretical research. While the
Emilia Romagna case focuses on macro trends in regional
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS4
change the roles of actors in governance networks will be
discussed. The second case study will instead present a
project focusing on the interface between urban regional
governance networks and urban populations. Both case
studies will highlight strategies for policy implementation
and indicate how mismatch of institutional and functional
systems is mitigated by these strategies.
Part III of this thesis, encompassing Chapters Six
and Seven, will provide a series of policy and project
recommendations based on research and observations
accomplished in the first two parts of this thesis.
The sixth chapter will provide a number of suggestions
for the practical application of ongoing projects in the
realm of digital communications technologies in United
States contexts. Chapter Six will focus specifically on
highlighting the specificities of the United States context
and demonstrate current trends in institutional and
functional mismatch in the United States. Experiences in
metropolitan planning and the implementation of digital
telecommunications technologies will help to highlight
this mismatch.
The seventh chapter of the thesis will apply policy
strategies presented in chapters four and five to two United
States cases, considering the socio-political constraints
presented in the previous chapter. The specific cases of
the New York Metropolitan Area and Portland Metropolitan
Areas will be used to showcase policy recommendations.
The eighth and final chapter of this thesis will be dedicated
to concluding the work with a series of summaries of each
chapter.
1.5 CASE EXPLORATIONS
In depth case explorations were accomplished through
interviews with public administration officials in the region
of Emilia Romagna. Project case exploration instead
technologies to better identify the current cultural
framework and constraints within which actors in urban
governance networks engage in planning activities.
The third chapter of this thesis will focus on the problems
faced by urban governance networks in light of changes and
shifts in the socio-spatial configuration of modern urban
systems. The concept of “mismatch” will be introduced
and discussed to highlight the differences between
functional capacity of urban governance networks and the
organization of the spatial system in which they operate.
While the city exists as a rich territorial system, it will be
argued that the scale of intervention of urban governance
networks is limited to more localized boundaries. Such
local boundaries render urban governance networks
ineffective in the dealing with more complex, systemic
urban problems, creating a mismatch between the
institutional and functional city.
Part II of this thesis, encompassing Chapters Four and
Five, will depict the evolutionary influence of urban
regional spatial organizations on social systems of spatial
organization and governance.
The fourth chapter of this thesis will move from a discussion
of problems to a discussion of policy solutions. It will
propose a theoretical framework for understanding the
activities of mitigation in a system of functional mismatch
discussed in the previous chapter. It will show that,
through the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies, governance networks can affectively adapt
to and mitigate the problem of institutional mismatch
by changing the dimension, scale and scope of their
operations.
The fifth chapter of this thesis will be dedicated to
highlighting and dissecting two specific cases in the
implementations of digital telecommunications systems to
urban regional governance. The first case study with highlight
specific examples of how digital telecommunications
technologies induce changes in governance systems and
CHAPTER 1 : THESIS PRESENTATION AND FORWARD 5
and ultimately redefine the scale and scope of governance
policy and projects in the region. Strategies and theories
understanding this redefinition of governance networks will
serve provide a series of recommendations for how future
application can be used not only to install digital technical
communications infrastructure in regional contexts, but
similar use such infrastructure and projects to reassemble
fragmented urban regional contexts.
1.5.2 PROJECT CASE EXPLORATION
The Urban Computing at Milan and Turin (UC@MITO)
project of the Alta Scuola Politecnica served as a two year
long project opportunity for the authors’ of this thesis to
apply strategies observed and discussed with regional
officials instituting the Piano Telematico di Emilia Romagna
with ongoing research in a project context. The project
envisioned an integrated online and spatial intervention
aimed at targeting and enhancing the interface and
dialogues between urban regional populations and urban
regional governance networks.
The UC@MITO project provided the authors of this thesis
with an opportunity to learn from experience and practical
application. Lessons learned, successful strategies and
failures of the project, will also be discussed and compiled
into a series of recommendations that will later serve to
structure policy strategies for future policy and project
implementation.
1.6 POLICY AND PROJECT RECOMMENDATIONS
The ultimate goal of this thesis is to unpack and study what
is proposed to be an innovative policy and project solution.
These recommendations, based on the observations and
encounters with actors involved in the Piano Telematico
di Emilia Romagna (PITER) and project experiences and
observations during the course of UC@MITO, point to the
creation of a policy that generates regional collaboration
showcases and demonstrates the acquisition of knowledge
from the authors’ of this thesis experience in the Urban
Computing in Milan and Turin (UC@MITO) Alta Scuola
Politecnica capstone project.
Exploration has been used to qualify these studies
because they provide an in depth survey of the trends,
relevant actors, policy initiatives and project constraints.
This thesis will make use of direction observation and
practical application of research in a project scenario to
draw conclusions that will ultimately become a series of
policy recommendations to be applied in different context.
1.5.1 POLICY CASE EXPLORATION
The Piano Telematico di Emilia Romagna will serve not
just as a case exploration in the successful adoption of
digital telecommunications technologies by regional and
local governance networks, but also as the example upon
which a wider theoretical model to describe the adoption
of digital telecommunications technologies in urban
governance networks will be based.
The Piano Telematico is a critical for a number of reasons.
What has emerged from its initial implementation is a
shift in the governance culture of Emilia Romagna. This
shift envisions and takes into account the collaborative
and infrastructural problems of Internet connectivity as
a regional project but coordinates the implementation
of specific policy initiatives by encouraging local
interventions. It similarly incentivizes local and regional
actors to participate in wider regional services by providing
Internet connectivity. Such a project increases the quantity
of connections amongst actors in urban governance
networks and also serves to increase the quality of
information exchange and collaboration between actors.
The Piano Telematico has thus not served only to provide
infrastructure but also to provide impetus for actors at
regional and local scales to collaborate and communicate,
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS6
project thus becomes a means by which actors solve a
problem that of wireless connectivity and in doing so learn
to collaborate more effectively.
1.8 FORWARD
After having briefly presented a theoretical framework that
will serve as a structuring thought, this thesis will present
research highlighting both the socio-spatial implications
of digital telecommunications infrastructure installation
and studies in metropolitan planning and governance
fragmentation. These two threads of research will then
be woven together to present possible project and policy
suggestions in the subsequent phases of this thesis.
articulated through local project initiatives. Using the
umbrella of digital telecommunications technologies
and Internet service provision and a strategy of regional
collaboration articulated in local project initiatives, the
institutional boundaries of network city configuration are
broken down by ongoing social exchange and collaborative
dialogue at the local level.
The mitigation of mismatch between functional and
institutional urban regional systems is argued as deriving
from shared value creation and actor role redefinition
through the implementation of a regional project targeting
the implementation and use of digital telecommunications
technologies.
Taking the quote of Saint Exupéry as a metaphor, digital
telecommunications infrastructure, its installation and use,
is the tower that redefines regional governance dynamics,
making new brothers and founding new forms of
collaboration in existing systems. The bread to encourage
and harry new forms of collaboration is the opportunity
to attract foreign capital and generate endogenous
economic development in an era of global interurban
regional competition and place marketing.
1.7 PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
Islands of urban governance with largely localized planning
agendas and project initiatives are now evolving into to urban
networks connected through infrastructure that extends
beyond local boundaries, that diminishes hierarchy in actor
collaboration and that promotes enhanced information
exchange. Individual city governments, recognizing both
limitations to effective project interventions at the local
level and opportunities deriving from collaboration and
participation in a larger urban network effectively solve
problems of Internet connectivity. Through instigating and
engaging in such collaborative dialogues however, new
governance cultures, governance network connections
and new scales of project intervention are opened up. The
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS10
context in which planners are currently operating.
The underlying tenet of Chapter Two is the conviction that
urban spaces are amalgamations and complex bundles or
representations of socio-technological change, with form
being indelibly tied and structured by socio-technological
function. It will serve as a contextualization for arguments
and assertions presented later in this thesis.
2.2 THE SOCIO-SPATIAL DIALECTIC
The theoretical concept that sits at the core of this thesis
is the “socio-spatial dialectic”. This concept, presented by
Paul Knox and Steven Pinch in their work, Urban Social Geography, identifies that “people create and modify
urban spaces while at the same time being conditioned
in varies ways by the spaces in which they live in work”
(2000). This is to say that, cities grow and develop based
on specific societal needs and constructs; while this
may be the case, the inherit constructs that gave form
the space constructed also form to shape social patterns
and social norms. The city must be read more than just
an amalgamation of spaces, but as an amalgamation of
“places”, each with its own intrinsic meaning and function.
Knox and Pinch go on to assert that,
space, then, cannot be regarded simply as a neutral medium in which social, economic and political are expressed. It is of importance in its own right in contributing both to the pattern of urban development and to the nature of the relationships between different groups within a city” (2000).
2.1 INTRODUCTION
The first part of the thesis, encompassing chapters two and
three, will be dedicated to showing how society influences
the evolution of space. The second chapter of this thesis is
dedicated to surveying and charting the evolution of urban
socio-spatial systems in the Post-War era.
The chapter will begin with introducing the geographic
concept of the socio-spatial dialectic to assert the notion
that there is an important nexus between the growth
and development of urban spaces and places and social
change. This concept will define the structure of the thesis.
The second chapter will be dedicated to demonstrating
how space induces an evolution in society. This evolutionary
process ultimately gives rise to the form and function of
modern urban systems, challenging urban governance
institutions to meet evolving needs with evolving technical
capacities. Using the lens of the socio-spatial dialectic, it
will continue with the exploration of a theoretical framework
for understanding the evolution of urban spaces. This
exploration will begin with a description of the Fordist city
and productive system. Following discussions of Fordist
urban social organizations, economic transitions and
developments in the Post-Fordist era will be discussed.
Specifically, trends towards a more globalized economy
and the impacts of this economy on urban socio-spatial
organizations will be presented. Concepts such as the
“mega city region” and the “network city” will finally be
presented to illustrate the form and function of modern
urban systems and how form and function differ from those
of the Fordist Era. Finally, the emergence of the Information
Society will be presented to discuss the socio-spatial
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 11
riddled with “contradictions of the capital relation” and
spatial organization. Brenner goes on to assert that,
capital’s continuous urge to annihilate space and time generated a dynamic of creative destruction in which configurations of territorial organization are recurrently constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed as geographical infrastructures for each round of capitalist organization (1998).
Capital and specifically the organization and reorganization
of capital in response to technological change, is in the
opinion of Brenner the driving force behind that socio-
spatial evolution of cities. The conflicts that arise within
urban spatial systems derive directly from the “spatial
fix” and long-term impact that initial capital investment
and organization has on urban environments. Urban
socio-spatial evolution is precluded on the ability to
mitigate tensions surrounding different modes of capital
organization.
While Brenner points to capital as the driver of urban
socio-spatial territorial organization, Esser and Hirsch,
in their article entitled, “The Crisis of Fordism and the
Dimensions of a ‘Post-Fordist’ Regional and Urban
Structure”, discuss the organizational dynamics that
develop around capital formations. Capitalist regimes
and their subsequent urban socio-spatial formations
are regenerated by specific “modes of accumulation”
and “modes of regulation”. “Modes of accumulation” are
specific socio-spatial constructs that generate a surplus
value to the system. Modes of accumulation are embodied
in the specific forms of labor and productive organization
that allow for a profit to be generated and reinvested in a
specific productive system. “Modes of regulation,” instead,
represent the vast and complex series of relationships
“between production and reproduction”. These “socially,
multifaceted configurations” take the form of “socio-
political institutions that give stability and allow for the
persistence of a given regime of capital organization
(Esser and Hirsch, 1989).
Space is a societal construct that similarly structures
patterns of communications and social relations.
Intervening in space through urban projects, it becomes
important to understand the social repercussions and
reconfigurations that will result.
The socio-spatial dialectic is a lens by which the problems
of mismatch between urban spatial configurations and
urban social organizations can be assessed, unpacked and
ultimately treated. It will be an ongoing exercise of this
thesis to consider both social and spatial organizations in
this regard to provide for a more complete assessment at its
conclusion. This first half of the thesis will be dedicated to
the reconfiguration of space in light of socio-technological
transformation. The second half of this thesis will instead
detail how evolving spaces in turn induce an evolution of
societal systems and governance networks.
2.3 CAPITAL AND URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL
ORGANIZATION
Keeping the notions of an ongoing evolutionary dialogue
between space and society in mind, Neil Brenner, in his
1998 work, “Global Cities, glocal states: global city formation
and state territorial restructuring in contemporary Europe”
asserts that the city is a construct and manifestation of
various epochs of capital agglomeration and accumulation.
These socio-technological realities give rise to different
socio-spatial organizations and forms as described by
Knox and Pinch’s socio-spatial dialectic. “Each phase
of capitalist development has been grounded upon
distinctive forms of territorial organization” he asserts,
“a socially produced ‘second nature’ composed of
elaborate transportation, communications and regulatory-
institutional infrastructures—through which capital can
circulate at socially average times” (Brenner, 1998). The
city is an agglomeration of capital “territorialized” that
is “in turn revalorized and reterritorialized during each
system crisis of capital accumulation” (Brenner, 1998).
This process of revalorization and reterritorialization is
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS12
system. Employees worked standardized hours in large
factories earning a regular wage, producing standardized
products to be sold on the market for mass consumption.
Regular wage labor encouraged mass consumption
patterns and lead to an increase in the general standard of
living for the working class as mass produced items greatly
decreased in price. Surplus value derived from the sale of
mass produced goods was invested back in large-scale
physical capital to perpetuate the cycle.
This regime of capital accumulation was complimented by
a complex and hierarchical regime of capital regulation.
Under the Fordist regime, economic production was a
function of national policy organization. This is largely due
to the fact that large capital and infrastructural investment
required a scale of investment and organization achievable
only at the national level. The city, within this context, was an
extension of state economic policy, intervened in through
indirect policy measures emanating from the central space,
a function of a nationally planned, wider economic system
(Lever, 2001). Being an “engine of Fordist production”,
the city was thus was an amalgamation of institutional
and productive infrastructures of a “globalized system
compartmentalized into distinct state-level matrices”, a
“sub-unit of national economic space” (Brenner, 1998).
The Fordist city was thus an object of investment and
socio-spatial manifestation of national economic policy.
In terms of socio-spatial organization, the Fordist city
“was characterized by strong agglomeration processes,
the standardization and industrialization of construction”
(Esser and Hirsch, 1989). With the advent of the mass
consumption and use of the automobile, “extreme spatial
functional differentiations developed, characterized
by suburbanism, the formation of satellite towns, the
depopulation of the inner cities the dying out of smaller
production and business operations” (Esser and Hirsch,
1989). The standardization in societal productive processes
was thus mirrored in the standardization and mass
production of separated and specialized urban spaces.
The scale of urban development expanded in response
Cities and urban systems being the spatial manifestations
of varying and evolving capitalist productive regimes
exhibit specific constructs in modes of accumulation
and modes of regulation. Being long term spatially fixed
constructs, however, such regimes persist and overlap
during the course of the evolution of productive economic
systems. To consider the current challenges facing specific
urban socio-spatial organizations, it is thus important to
consider the modern heritage and socio-spatial legacies
serving as opportunities and constraints to their ongoing
development and evolution. To understand cities, it is
important to understand the capitalist productive regimes,
the modes of accumulation and the modes of regulation,
that have given structure to their organization.
2.4 THE FORDIST ERA
The evolution of regimes of modes of capital accumulation
and regulation has historically been marked by a number
of distinct epochs. These epochs represent functional
societal organizations and configurations that have evolved
during the course of time and continue to evolve today.
The first modern regime of capital accumulation and
regulation to make note of is Fordism. Fordism refers to
the apex of heavy industrial organization and production
and is the capitalist productive regime typical of the post-
war era leading up to the economic recession and crisis of
the 1970’s. Fordism is characterized by profit and surplus
value generation derived from the economies of scale
derived from large units of industrial production.
Fordism as a regime of capital accumulation is built on the
virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption.
Mass production was met with mass consumption of
large quantities of standardized and homogenized goods
previously inaccessible to most households. These mass
consumption patterns were encouraged by higher wages
and standardized labor deriving from the functional
organization and large scale of the Fordist productive
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 13
dominated by a core Central Business District. This district
serves as the economic and social hub of the city. Outlying
suburbs are connected to the urban core by way of radial
infrastructural axes. The city is functional linked, but
spatially separated from other cities in a national urban
system of production.
2.6 SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRANSITION AND THE
EMERGENCE OF A GLOBAL ERA
During the 1970’s, the Fordist regime of socio-economic
organization underwent a crisis. In light of the ongoing
oil crisis and resulting global economic stagnation,
the seemingly virtuous cycle mass consumption and
mass production of Fordist capital organization faced
both internal and external pressures. With innovations
in telecommunications and transport technologies,
the 1970’s represented the advent of the multinational
corporation. Such “footloose” entities, in an effort to
circumvent systemic costs associated with labor and heavy
capital in already developed countries, began to integrate
globally dispersed systems of production to garner a
profit margin. Such global competition and investment in
capital was complimented by the further mechanization
and rationalization of production processes, thus requiring
less and less unskilled labor than previous waves of
industrial organization in developed countries. Goods,
mass produced and assembled in dispersed locations
operating abroad and across national boundaries quickly
outcompeted domestically mass produced goods and
shifted the attention of industrial investment abroad in
the developing world. Mass production, standardization
and heavy capital investments generating profit margins
from economies of scale in light of the economic crisis
soon become rigid, uncompetitive structure suffering from
diseconomies of scale.
Cities of the industrialized world at the time, within the
context of national and international economic transition
in the 1970s, suffered immensely. While on the national
to this socio-spatial standardization and specialization
and in response to the advent of the automobile which
greatly changed individual perceptions of distance and
connectivity. Cities and towns thus became “uncongenial”
and “standardized” as a function of the productive and
consumptive needs generated by the wider economic
system.
2.5 THE MONOCENTRIC CITY
The socio-spatial constructs of the Fordist era are typified
in the monocentric model of urban spatial configuration.
The following image exemplifies the main elements of this
specific socio-spatial configuration.
As evinced the scheme above, the monocentric city is
Figure 2-1 ; a schematic image depicting a monocentric city region
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS14
will become the new system of production” (Lever, 2001).
Specialized and flexible capital is completed not by
“geographical situation, but increasingly result from the
availability of a qualified workforce” to service this capital
and regional geographic amenities (Esser and Hirsch,
1989). The specificity of local amenities, taking the form
of transportation services, governance networks and
organization and commercial activity, become competitive
advantages to attracting capital and generating jobs.
The implications for the socio-spatial organization of
city life, or modes of regulation, in light of the transition
to a Post-Fordist productive system are many. The city,
“delinked” from it’s function in the organization of capital
in the national economy, “has become embedded ever
more directly in trans-state urban hierarchies and inter-
urban networks” (Brenner, 1998). With specialized and
flexible capital readily transferable, the emphasis of urban
economic amenity and productive capacity has switched
to the “creating of ‘milieux innovatrices’ which encourage
new firm formation” (Lever, 2001). Cities compete to
attract capital investment based on regional agglomerative
amenities, often “publicizing the virtues of the local
business climate” and stressing “the quality of life, the
availability of good services and good image” (Lever, 2001).
The production of knowledge and services attract capital
and focus attention to regional specificity and quality of
life to ultimately generate endogenous economic growth.
The nexus of economic activity in such urban systems and
regional agglomerations are no longer urban economic
districts separated by functional productivity, but rather
“mobility environments”, spaces of great accessibility that
layer socioeconomic meaning and function (Bertolini and
Dijst, 2003). In a highly competitive, international network of
cities competing for economic vitality in the form of capital
investment, “milieux innovatrices”, competitive cities, thus
are challenged to attract investment through enhancement
of connectivity to and ease of passage between different
but complimentary urban environments. Given a choice of
place, it is those cities that combine internal connectivity
to regional amenities with external connectivity to the
level, economic crisis decreased funding to urban
infrastructures of economic importance, Fordist socio-
economic organization and the advent of the automobile
as a primary means of transit allowed for the dispersion
of middle class households away from urban cores. Less
national funding and local tax bases severely depleted city
governments trying to stem the tide of increasing urban
poverty and infrastructural neglect. Heavy industries,
which were once main centers of employment in urbanized
areas, laid off employees by the thousands. The 1970s
and 1980s thus was the era of hollowing out of the city
in most developed countries, with capital investments
instead being transferred to a global scale of coordination
and organization. The city in the industrialized world, it
seemed, had lost its vocation as an engine of economic
growth, becoming instead a burdensome infrastructural
agglomeration of a bygone productive era.
2.7 THE POST-FORDIST ERA
The growing pains of the economic crisis of the 1970s
and 1980s were the symptoms of a Schumpeterian Leap,
or transition, in the configuration of the modes of capital
accumulation and regulation. The heavy capital, mass
production and national coordination of economies in
the Fordist era slowly gave way to flexible and specialized
production at a global level of coordination in the Post-
Fordist era.
The Post-Fordist mode of accumulation is “characterized
by global interdependence on production, finance,
distribution, migration and trade” with the “growth of
multinational enterprises and financial institutions run by
a new class of global executives and professionals with
shape consumption and production patterns” (Lever,
2001). These multinational enterprises generate profit
not through economies of scale of mass production but
“flexible specialization, characterized by new principles of
production, specialist units of production a decentralized
management and versatile technologies and workforces
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 15
there has been the “unstoppable transformation of the
city a region” (2003). The “city center” in this context, is
only “one of many competing economic spaces” because
of innovation in and reconfiguration of capital organization
is the Post-Fordist era. What has emerged specifically
from this city-region organization is a form of “in-
between city”. This in-between city is a an agglomeration
of “diffused and disorganized structures of urban spaces
without an identifiable center but with a few islands of
geometrically shapeable patterns” structured by “strongly
functionally specialized areas, networks and hubs” (Koll-
Schretzenmayr, 2003). Urban spaces, in this opinion
are emerging as spatially diffused and expansive, but
functionally structured networks of spatial organizations.
The following are three descriptions of the shift to city-
region organizations of urban space, noting the above-
mentioned expansions in geographic scale and dispersion
of service provision. Dynamics of these shifts are
summarized in the chart on page 16.
global market and global network of urban environments
that will win in terms of competitiveness.
Given a shift in the socio-spatial manifestation of modes
of capital regulation and accumulation, it has become
evident that the monocentric city no longer suffices as
a model of urban spatial configuration. A number of
urban spatial forms and descriptions of their dynamics
have been hypothesized and discussed at great length.
It is important to note that, the reorganization and
reterrotrialization of capital in the Post-Fordist era has had
the impact of changing the scalar perception of urban
spaces; essentially moving the focus of urban spatial
interventions from beyond the central area the city and
considering equally the region in which the city is located.
2.8 POLYCENTRIC CITIES AND URBAN REGIONS
The socio-spatial organization of the Post-Fordist city is
marked by a multiplication of scale and a dispersion of
services across a larger geographic region. Peter Hall and
Kathy Pain, in their work The Polycentric Metropolis, provide
a number of insights into this scale of transformation,
specifically citing the emergence of city-regions. In Hall
and Pains opinion what has emerged in the Post-Fordist
Era is a form known as the “Polycentric Urban Region”
(Hall and Pain, 1996). Their work is a landmark study in
emerging metropolitan forms across the European Union
and provides an in depth look at social and policy issues
that emerge from the multiplication of scale of what is
normally defined as the “city”. Their main conviction is that
emerging functional agglomerations at a regional level are
based on thick and extensive business and interpersonal
networks and enhanced by innovations and transportation
and communications technologies. This regional functional
agglomeration that emerges, in the opinion of Hall and
Pain, is the necessary unit of social-economic competition
to be considered in the modern era.
The words of Hall are echoed by Martina Koll-Schretzenmayr
Figure 2-2 ; a schematic image depicting a polycentric city region
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS16
Figure 2-3 ; a diagram schematically representing different permutations of monocentric and polycentric city regions
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 17
2.8.1 CITY REGION
Hall and Pain proposed the concept of city region to
describe emerging urban forms. Functional linkages and
innovations in transport and communications technologies
have allowed for the creation of urban regional scales of
development (Hall and Pain, 2003). A city region would
be in the polycentric and dispersedquandrant of the chart
to the left.
2.8.2 MEGACITY REGION
The megacity region represents a loss of control of
urban regional growth. This form, primarily prevalent in
developing world cities, is at a scale that is often riddled
with diseconomies of scale (Hall and Pain, 2003). This
form is still dominated by the expansion of a central city
and is instead captured in the dynamics of monocentric
and dispersed.
2.8.3 NETWORK CITY
The network city, finally, is a specific form of city region
organization. This form is specific to contexts where there
are:
• a number of historically distinct cities located in close
geographic proximity
• a lack of clear leading city which dominates political,
cultural and economic policy
• a system of independent political entities
Network cities are articulated by a multiplicity of urban
nodes that often perform subsidiary functions, suggesting
a more centralized and polycentric structure as indicated
in the chart to the left (Cowell, 2010).
These forms vary in scale and socio-spatial organization
at a global level. This being said, a common link between
the following three models is an expansion beyond
administrative geographic boundaries of the institutional
cities. Urban systems in this sense overflow beyond the
boundaries imposed by socio-political constructs because
of a multiplication of scale and expansion of urban
development.
2.9 NETWORK SOCIETY
Society since the transition to a Post-Fordist paradigm
has continued to evolve. Such evolution implies a similar
evolution in the configuration of urban spaces. Internet
connectivity and the advent of digital telecommunications
technologies have redefined the fundamentals of day-
to-day human communication. There is, in this regard,
an important social dimension to Internet connectivity,
as communication is the fundamental basis of the
coordination, development and continuation of modern
society. A number of authors offer salient insights into
how such technologies are redefining social interaction
and sharing.
Manuel Castells has been the most influential thinker
on the transformations brought about by digital
telecommunications technologies. In his work, The
Informational City, Castells introduced the idea of the
‘space of flows’. Castells argues that the digital revolution
has allowed the emergence of a networking logic of global
development, concluding that dominant functions and
processes are increasingly organized the space of flows
that digital telecommunications networks make possible.
The space of flows in this regard is an economic space
embedded in the global network, with its communications
infrastructure, its nodes and hubs, and the organization
of the operators who run them. He argues that power
resides in the network, not at the nodes, and it cannot
be controlled from any individual node. In the opinion of
Castells, individual “presence or absence in the network
and the dynamics of each network vis-á-vis others are
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS18
critical sources of domination and change in our society”
(Castells, 1996). Inclusion and exclusion in the space of
flows determine the position of individuals, households,
cities and nations. Regions without proper access to the
space of flows will be consigned to a role of economic
marginality. In this context, the informational city is not
a form but a process characterized by the structural
domination of the space of flows (Castells, 1996).
In the opinion of Fernandez Maldonado, the Internet allows
users to control and shape technology. Its openness
causes the diffusion to the masses resulting in great
implications for empowering them and transforming
society from the bottom-up (2004). Another result is
that digital telecommunications technologies applications
make the separation of social interaction from physical co-
presence possible (Fernandez Moldanado, 2004). These
phenomena lead social theorists agree that social relations
are transgressing the local boundaries is an essential part
in order to understand contemporary societies. When in
the past most human activities were confined locally, today
a long process of technological progress made it possible
for the society to become increasingly more independent
of geography which extends our exchanges initiatives
and activities to the whole world (Fernandez Maldonado,
2004).
As echoed in the voices of the authors above, the
emergence of a network society has allowed for: a
compression of perceptions of space and time, a rapid
increase in glocal connections, and the emergence
of urban spaces that articulated nodes in an otherwise
network of flows of information, goods and people. These
dynamics are summarized in order in the schemes to the
right.
What emerges from these observations is the model of
a hyper connected, Synchronsociety. This paradigm, first
asserted by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH) reframes and redefines the forms of
social interaction in the Internet era. Figure 2-4 ; schemes indicating the socio-spatial impacts of digital telecommunications technologies
....compression of space time and aperceived decrease in distance
urban spaces as intense nodes of exchange in network structure of flows of goods
and people
glocal connections leading to an increased of multiscale exchange
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 19
To briefly explain the below-mentioned concepts, “avatars”
refers to a hyper individualization but also multiplication
of identities. Users of the Internet can operate and “live”
in varying geographic and virtual milieu, participating
in multiple and expansive geographic networks.
“Collaboration” instead refers to the ability to reach
across wider geographic scales, having a multiplicity of
presentences in collective efforts across such wide scales.
“Real Time Data” refers to the fact that online connectivity
and the rapidity of online information exchange allows
Figure 2-5 ; a chart representing new forms of collaboration and coordination in network societies
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS20
for users to not only quantify but continuously update
measurements of urban spaces or societal trends. Finally,
“flash mobs” instead refers to globally coordinated and
locally implemented social movements. These theoretical
concepts are linked because they represent efforts to
reach across and seek to breakdown imposed geographic
boundaries and scales and focus on global social network
connectivity and coordination and instead experiment
with virtual co-presenence and collaboration. It should
be noted that within this scheme, Internet connectivity
has allowed for a hyper individualization and globalization
of identity and interaction. Information and people are
increasingly quantified in flows and exchanges between
hyper-connected hubs of spatial and virtual activity.
A common unifying element of the synchronsociety
paradigm, however, is the ongoing pertinence of place,
with virtual social movements and exchanges building in
and acting upon specific spatial dimensions.
The Internet has channeled social means of expression
to the individual and global level, challenging and
redefining traditional means of information sharing and
collaboration. The diagram above evinces an ongoing
redefinition of individual and group identity in with the
ongoing adoption of and experimentation with Internet
connectivity. After having analyzed these ongoing societal
transitions, what becomes crucial to understand thus is the
spatial articulation and geographies of emerging societal
organizations.
2.10 CAPITAL AND CITIES IN THE INFORMATION AGE:
THE ISSUE OF BOUNDARIES
Much like online connectivity, the emerging spatial
organizations of the contemporary city are articulated
by spaces of subjective definition of reality. In the same
way that web browsers allow users to scroll quickly
through extensive sources of online information, the city
is now slowly being redefined as an evolving series of
experiences in specific, but multiple geographic contexts.
The contexts, which at times can be contradictory are
referential not to spatial organization, but projections
of the individual city users’ perceptions of identity and
embeddedness in specific social networks extending
well beyond traditional geographic notions of scale. As
the user increasingly becomes the point of reference,
administrative organizations and geographic boundaries
give way to a scale defined by individual social activity and
engagement. As identified by Fernandez Maldonando,
“the city is not a defined topological entity with a center,
periphery and hinterland anymore, but a more complex
type of urban phenomenon that comprises processes
and activities developed in the real space and in digital
space or cyberspace” (2004). This new development of
performing urban activities initiated a different system of
spatial principles in a city based primarily on the structuring
organizational logics of the Information society. The
traditional motives, conditions and patterns of mobility are
not the same any more. The radius of distribution of work,
commercial, residential and recreational activities expands
and diffuses in space and time (Fernandez Maldonado,
2004).
While the concept of co-presence morphs traditional
geographic conceptions of scale, Stephen Graham and
Simon Marvin in their book Telecommunications and The City note that the spatial fix of digital telecommunications
cannot be negated. They note that, “telecommunications
can help to stimulate more travel as cheaper and more
accessible forms of communication generate new demands
for the physical movement of goods and people” (Graham
and Marvin, 1996). The paradox of such stimulated
demand is that, “although telecommuting and teleworking
initiatives may be able to help reduce levels of peak time
congestion, they have a multitude of second order effects”
(Graham and Marvin, 1996). The teleworker has to heat his
or her home and workplace, generates and demands the
creation of new transit infrastructure, meaning that digital
telecommunications “do not necessarily lead to reductions
in material flows through cities” (Graham and Marvin, 1996).
Although digital telecommunications do not have a primary
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 21
impact on spatial configurations, their use and adaptation
have indirect impacts on flows of information, goods and
individuals. The spatial fix of digital telecommunications
technologies is primarily a function of their impact on
socio-spatial movement and exchange that now operate
at glocal scales. With “little respect for the barriers of
space and time” digital telecommunications infrastructure
is the “spaceless” “silent” infrastructure that is giving
new shapes to cities (Graham and Marvin, 1996). “Most
weave unseen through the fabric of cities” but structure
new physical and virtual flows that seemingly divide urban
systems in “fragments” through the process of scale
definition (Graham and Marvin, 1996). City economies and
urban systems are thus becoming fragmented collections
of nodes distributed in regional, national and international
networks, posing specific problems to urban governance
in the realms of global competitiveness and place-making.
Virtual networks, through their power to restructure flows
of information and people thus inform and give shape to
physical urban networks.
Bertolini and Dijst, in their 2003 work, Mobility Environments
and Network Cities, point this emerging relevance of digital
telecommunications technologies and need for planners
to act within “mobility environments”. These milieu are
characterized as of layered nodes socio-spatial in multiple
networks and flows of people, goods and information. Such
mobility environments, like train stations, airports, motor
service areas, urban public squares and parks, articulate
the “increasingly borderless nature of the contemporary
city” (Bertolini and Dijst, 2003). Such layered socio-spatial
meaning allows for “each individual, group or organization
to increasingly create his own virtual city which has no
set physical or administrative boundaries, but is rather a
specific and changeable combination of activity places
connect by transport networks within definite socio-
economic and behavioural constraints” (Bertolini and
Dijst, 2003). Such multiplicity of place and identity, in
their opinion requires planners in their opinion to look
beyond traditional geographic scales, focusing instead on
“physical and social connectivity” to stimulate and enliven
urban spaces. What is required is the planning for flexible
nodes that ultimately allow for a “temporal specialization”
and reappropriation of space by the individual user. For
Bertolini and Dijst, the role of the planner is not to operate
in specific urban spatial organizations or tissues, but rather
places of overlapping systems of information exchange
and movement that are articulated at varying geographic
scales.
Finally, in his book, E-Topia, William Mitchell also elaborates
the socio-spatial dialectic of emerging network societies
and more specifically cities. Mitchell paints a picture
of how society will evolve given the diffusion of digital
telecommunications technologies, describing everything
from the reconfiguration of everyday appliances to the
adaptation and reuse of urban public in this digital age.
In the twenty-first century, Mitchell asserts, “high-speed,
digital communications infrastructure will refashion the
urban patterns that emerged from nineteenth and twentieth
century transportation, water supply and waste removal,
electric power supply and telephone networks” (Mitchell,
2000). Such digital telecommunications technologies not
only will reconfigure spatial arrangements, but similarly
have an impact on social communication.
Urban spatial “rearrangements” are in part a result
of social rearrangements given innovations in digital
communications technologies. Mitchell asserts that,
digital telecommunications thus extends and intensifies the earlier effect of transportation networks, mail systems, the telegraph and the telephone. It serves as a mechanism for economic and social integration on a large geographic scale, cutting across traditional political borders... it proliferates tertiary social relationships (2000).
This increase in intensity of collaboration and
communication directly has an impact on the perception
of scale. Mitchell goes on to assert that,
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS22
boundaries of large-scale civic units – cities, metropolitan regions, and even nation-states – are being contested at many levels…global information flows are reducing the importance of old political borders and diminishing the effectiveness of physical public space in producing and representing internal social integration… (2000).
“Traditional” boundaries do not have the same social
relevance in the Internet era, with social relations between
individuals across wider geographic scales increasing.
This increase is accompanied by a densification of local
information exchange and collaboration. Intensified online
information and communication networks also require a
place of meeting and face-to-face communication. “We
still need agoras”, Mitchell asserts, making the case that
planning in the internet age is charged with accommodating
new and complex combinations of the physical and the
virtual. While individuals creatively adapt spaces to suite
this burgeoning needs, it becomes the role of planning
institutions to understand and respond to such creative
adaptation with supporting policy and project initiatives.
Mitchell, during the course of his discussion of E-Topia,
closes with a cautionary note. He asserts that, “long-
established settlement patterns and social arrangements
are remarkably resistant to even the powerful pressures for
change; mostly they transform slowly, messily, unevenly,
and incompletely, and human nature hardly alters at
all” (Mitchell, 2000). People and spaces can thus be
reconfigured and adapted to ongoing shifts in digital
communications technologies; this being said, this process
of ongoing change is by no way linear or even.
Moving forward, the specific aim of this thesis is to chart
urban socio-spatial evolution in the twentieth century, to
ultimately identify where there is a “messy” and “uneven”
transition, where social constructs do not service the needs
of spatial systems, and finally how innovations in digital
telecommunications can be used in project scenarios to
mitigate this mismatch. In light of Mitchell’s arguments,
the thesis will aim to document how infrastructural
Figure 2-6 ; a historic map depicting the positions of telegraph cables
Figure 2-7 ; a map of world digital teleconnectivity traffic
Figure 2-8 ; a map of North American digital teleconnectivity traffic
Figure 2-9 ; a map of European digital teleconnectivity traffic
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTION OF URBAN SOCIO-SPATIAL SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN ERA 23
unprecedented degree” (Brenner, 1998). It is in the opinion
of Brenner, that the social aspects of capital formations
are driven by and constantly challenge and reshape
“configurations of territorial organization on differential
spatial scales (1998). While the scales of capital and state
territorial organization have never “exactly” corresponded,
Brenner notes that a,
reduction in the scale of regulatory-institutional organization increases the power of capital over space and constrains the command of territorially-organized interests to control territorial organization. Scale reduction, therefore, reconfigures the boundaries of territorial organizational principles and intensifies inter-territorial struggle (1998).
The footloose nature of capital in the Post-Fordist and
Network Society era is driving a system of inter urban
competition based on relative regional agglomerative
amenities of urbanized areas. While the power exerted by
capital is apparent, what is not apparent is the reason for
the impotency of urban institutional constructs in solving
what are becoming increasingly regional organizational
problems. It thus becomes important to exam Brenner’s
notion of the “reduction of scale” of urban institutions.
While arguments have been made that the increasingly
fragmentation of urban institutions contributes to regional
stagnancy and stunted regional economic growth, the
reason for such a perception of fragmentation could be
explained by a number of factors. This reduction of scale
in this sense could either mean the fragmentation of
existing urban governance networks or the relative increase in scale and growth of urban spatial organizations as
evinced in the Post-Fordist Era. It becomes critical to also
chart the evolution of urban governance and institutional
evolution in the Post-Fordist era to understand from where
and why this seeming mismatch between institutional and
functional space has occurred.
changes induce shifts and modifications in existing
governance network and similarly how infrastructural
projects can be used to induce shifts but also provide for
new multifunctional/ multidimensional “agora”.
2.11 THE SCALAR DILEMMA FOR GOVERNANCE
Contemporary urban forms preclude an expansion of
functional geographic scale. What has emerged in the
Post-Fordist and Network Society era is growth and
development beyond the socio-spatial boundaries and
conceptions of what is traditionally defined as a “the city”.
As polycentric and regional urban systems begin to emerge
and become the dominant organizational of paradigm of
capital, a question unfolds: how to govern and regulate
such a new scale of activity? Are contemporary modes of
regulation adequate for dealing with the emerging spatial
organizations of the network society?
While in a Schumpeterian Leap technological change
induces a crisis in modes of capital accumulation and
regulation, both elements of capital organization often to
not shift cohesively. This is to say that, although urban
systems are indeed responding to and shifting in light
of technological change, regulatory institutions may not
have made a shift to meet the needs and encourage
the perpetuation of the new paradigm. In light of this
observation, another question unfolds: has the institutional
city not yet caught up to the functional city in the Post-
Fordist Era?
Brenner, in his 1998 work, “Global Cities, glocal states:
global city formation and state territorial restructuring in
contemporary Europe”, offers insight into the implications
of technological shift on the institutional organization
and shift in institutional organization of urban systems.
He notes that, “the scales of capital accumulation have
never corresponded exactly with those of state territorial
organization, but the most recent round of globalization
has intensified this scalar disjuncture to a historically
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS24
2.12 CONCLUSION
Chapter Two has been dedicated to charting and
understanding the mechanisms of evolution of urban
social and spatial systems. As urban systems have moved
and evolved through epochs of capital organization, new
forms of spatial organization respond to societal functional
needs.
Capital informing ongoing evolution in urban socio-spatial
systems, digital telecommunications technologies, is not
primary structuring infrastructure as in past epochs, but
rather an infrastructure that forms and reshapes movement,
having a secondary impact on urban spaces. It has been
shown that the scale of urbanization has moved beyond
traditional spatial boundaries, multiplied to regional and
glocal scales, and entered into a virtual dimension of social
network and information exchange. This scale has been
shown to disregard existing local institutional boundaries
and poses organizational challenges to local governance
organizations.
In emerging urban regional systems, strategic problems
are posed to governance organizations primarily based
on controlling and collaborating in define geographic
jurisdictions. Chapter Three will exam the historic
experimentation with scale expansion of urban governance
systems. It will detail and expand upon the historical
experiences and failures of metropolitan governance. An
ultimate claim will be made that there is still a mismatch
to between urban functional and urban institutional space
that needs to be reckoned with at the end of the chapter.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS28
a survey of the experimentation with different scales of
governments and government giving the evolution of
urban form. While a specific type of urban region and
network city has emerged, Chapter Three proposes that
the evolution and initial failure of metropolitan governance
is the result of a “scalar dilemma” of intervention that is still
being mitigated through new experiments in metropolitan
planning and governance.
3.2 METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE AND URBAN
SYSTEMS
Chapter Three of this thesis will move from a general
discussion of the functional organizations of modern
urban systems and their evolution throughout time, to
a more specific discussion about a specific social and
regulatory component operating in functional urban
systems: government and governance networks. As was
discussed in Chapter Two of this thesis, the socio-spatial
organization of modern urban systems has evolved into
a hyper-connected, polycentric, urban region. Functioning
as a productive system of goods and service exchange
at local and global levels, cities have evolved to meet
and encompass the scale economies of their economic
and social outputs. Social constructs imbedded in these
functional systems so too have evolved across time.
With the expansion of geographic spatial scale of urban
systems, so too has the social scale and consciousness of
their functional organization been expanded. Thus, with
the expansion and development of the city as a polycentric
mega region, urban governance networks have attempted
to respond to the greater needs of a larger functional
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The first chapter of this thesis was dedicated to a general
overview of the theoretical and organizational framework.
The second chapter of this thesis was instead dedicated
to charting the evolution of urban socio-spatial systems
across time. The Fordist and Post-Fordist city, and the
emergence of the mega-city region and network city were
discussed to better paint a picture of the opportunities
and constraints facing planners working in modern urban
systems.
The third chapter of this thesis will focus on the problems
faced by urban governance networks in light of changes and
shifts in the socio-spatial configuration of modern urban
systems. The concept of “mismatch” will be introduced
and discussed to highlight the differences between
functional capacity of urban systems and the institutional
organizational capacity of urban governance networks.
While the city exists as rich territorial system, it will be
argued that the scale of intervention of urban governance
networks is limited to more localized boundaries, thus
rendering urban governance networks ineffective in the
dealing with more complex, systemic urban problems in
issues of transportation planning, economic development
and social equity issues now operating at regional scales.
Chapter Three will be an overview of the scholarly debate
concerning metropolitan government and governance in
the modern era. This debate will serve to develop a number
of main issues in governance and strategic planning
related to the premises of this thesis.
The common structural threads of Chapter Three are
CHAPTER 3: WHITHER METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE? 29
FIgure 3-1 ; a schematic depiction of the role of infrastructure in the growth and development of urban regions, adapted from the works of Pinzon Cortes entitled Mapping Urban For Morphology: Studies in the Contemporary Urban Landscape, TU Delft, 2009.
system with the concept of “metropolitan government”.
Neil Brenner, in his work, Globalisation as Re-territorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union, highlights the socio-economic
importance of a congruency between “functional” and
“institutional” systems in urban regions. Brenner asserts
that technology and social change induce evolution in the
urban system and thus a need for institutional change.
The development of an increasingly interconnected
global economy superimposes a new layer of socio-
spatial meaning and spaces on cities. Development
induces an evolution in the functional organization of the
urban system. This new socio-spatial layer has similarly
a given form shaped by contemporary technological
inputs, the needs which need to be reckoned with by
governance networks to promote healthy and stable
regional economies. Technology, or capital, is imbedded in
complex and fixed territorial systems, but also influences
and shapes the needs to be met by governance networks.
Cities, he asserts,
territorialize capital through their agglomeration of
relatively fixed and immobile infrastructures such as transport systems, energy supplies, communications networks and other externalities that underpin historically specific forms of production, exchange, distribution and consumption (Brenner, 1998).
The “restlessly transformative dynamics” of capital,
through structuring urban regional systems, constantly
induce evolutionary changes in these very systems, as
was discussed in Chapter Two. This is because capital
“renders its own historically specific geographical
preconditions obsolete, inducing a wave of restructuring to
reterritorialise” the socio-spatial organization of the urban
system. The city is not a fixed system, but rather a system
of constant flux and evolution of capital. “Territorially fixed
state institutions” aiming to control and coordinate capital
investment remain the “scaffolding within and through
which differential forms of capital are successively de and
re-territorialized” (Brenner, 1998). While technological
change through capital investment changes the socio-
spatial form of urban systems, it similarly induces the
same evolutionary activity in institutions that serves
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS30
institution that can effectively act upon and within the
functional urban system. Technological change has
induced the evolution of urban socio-spatial systems,
requiring institutions to respond in evolving bundles of
jurisdictions and service provisions with “the historical
evolution of metropolitan institutional arrangements being
closely intertwined with successive phases of capitalist
organization” (Brenner, 2003). Lefebvre and Brenner
also touch upon observations that modern metropolitan
planning institutions are facing new challenges in socio-
spatial organization and service provision deriving from
the development of a hyperconnected and globalized
economy. Today, cities influenced by global “capital”
provision at a regional scale, this often requires action
outside their established administrative boundaries. While
in the Fordist Era such geographic productive restrictions
were mitigated by the outright expansion of the
boundaries of the city (colonizing and securing resources
in the hinterland), today such expansion is limited by a
retrenched sense of localism. The expansionist city being
fed by a vast hinterland progressively incorporated within
its boundaries is no longer a paradigm that captures the
global dynamics of capital organization in urban regional
systems.
3.3 METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT AND
GOVERNANCE: AN OVERVIEW
According to Lefebvre, a metropolitan government
is the overarching authority of a wider city region,
or metropolitan area. The notable characteristics of
a “metropolitan government” are the fact that such
government entities: “have strong political legitimacy…and
meaningful autonomy from both senior governments and
local authorities… wide ranging jurisdiction and ‘relevant’
territorial cover consisting of the functional urban area”
(1998). A metropolitan government is thus the overarching
institution charged with the organizational and strategic
planning of a wider city region, the “functional geography”
and “economic footprint of the city (Turok, 2009).
as the very backbone of their existence. The change in
functional organization of urban governance is reflected
in the Fordist and Post-Fordist epochs discussed in the
previous chapter of this thesis. While in the Fordist era
metropolitan governance and government was “a vertical,
coordinative and redistributive relationship within a
national administrative hierarchy” the retrenchment of the
welfare state and the transition to a Post-Fordist, global
economy induced a shift to “a horizontal, competitive
and developmentalist relationship between sub-national
economic territories battling against one another”
(Brenner, 2003).
Both Lefebvre and Brenner assert the need for an urban
FIgure 3-2 ; a schematic representation of the urban regions showing superimposed ayers of urbanized space, government boundaries and infrastructure
CHAPTER 3: WHITHER METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE? 31
government authority through “the direct election of
executives” (Lefebvre, 1998). What remains certain is that
to accomplish the economies of scale in service provision
at a regional level, the metropolitan government must have
some level overarching authority over local governments.
This authority is derived both from legal concessions and
frameworks and socio-cultural norms whereby individual
citizens recognize and are loyal to the institutional authority
of the wider organization.
In terms of functional organization Lefebvre goes on
to assert that governments can either be structured as
“supramunicipal” bodies or “intermunicipal bodies” (1998).
“Supramunicipal” refers to a government organization that
is an overarching authority in a metropolitan area, wielding
power that overrides local interests for the sake of wider
metropolitan goods and services. English metropolitan
counties, observes Lefebvre, are one of the best examples
of this form of governmental organization. “Intermunicipal
bodies” represent in practice more of a collaborative
planning process between local municipalities and
governments at the metropolitan level. This is because
“intermunicipal bodies” often derive power and legitimacy
from member institutions and because they “rarely have
financial autonomy” (Lefebvre, 1998). These metropolitan
councils were composed of officials directly elected from
local municipalities and wield wider organizational and
collaborative powers in transportation planning, waste
disposal and water management, public transit and urban
planning. In Lefebvre’s opinion, metropolitan governments
derive their power from being the sum of individual local
parts. Whether this is enshrouded in an overarching regional
body or collaborative network of local municipalities, there
remains an important interplay between local and regional
needs provision.
Lefebvre closes his discussion about the need and
organization for metropolitan government with a number
of cautionary notes about why metropolitan governments
could, in theory, fail. Metropolitan governments are only
truly “legitimate” if “the population recognizes itself in
While various names and definitions have been given
to describe the form of metropolitan government and
governance networks, what remains certain is the need
for a form of “metropolitan government” in a functional
city region. As asserted by Lefebvre in his 1998 work,
Metropolitan Government and Governance in Western Countries, A Critical Review, “there is a need to make the
urban institutional system correspond to the economic and
social development of cities”. Metropolitan governments
that first emerged in the Fordist era capturing this dynamic
being that they reflect an organization based on,
large units of government are more efficient in the production of a certain number of services because they can take advantage of the vast economies of scale that a vast territory and large population can afford them.
In addition, “larger metropolitan government structures”
during the Fordist era, “allowed resources to be better
distributed within the territory, and their planning ability
makes the localization facilities, activites and housing
more harmonious” (Lefebvre, 1998). Lefebvre thus claims
that there is an “economies of scale” of social “goods”
provision that, in a functional urban region, can only be
met by some sort of metropolitan regional government
structure.
To meet such needs, Lefebvre goes on to make a number
of policy recommendations about the ideal institutional
organization of regional governments and governance
networks, based on his supposition that “institutional”
and “functional” systems must somehow overlap to
ultimately provide for the well-being of the urban
region’s inhabitants (1998). He first makes the assertion
that metropolitan governments must be “powerful,
autonomous and legitimate” (Lefebvre, 2002). “Powerful”
implies “responsibility and financial means attributed
to government”, while, “autonomy” implies “capacity
to implement policy relative to spheres of authority in
territories they control” (Lefebvre, 1998). “Legitimacy”
instead implies, the recognition of metropolitan
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS32
3.4 LOCALIST INTERESTS AND THE REBUTTAL TO
METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT
The rise and construction of metropolitan governance
networks and collaboration, though needed given the
socio-spatial evolution of urban systems, has run aground
on a number of socio-political debates. One of the most
crucial obstacles standing in the way of the construction
of more cohesive metropolitan governance networks, as
discussed in the previous paragraph, is the resurgence of
a more “localist” response to the question of urban service
provision. As was mentioned by Lefebvre “center cities…
are now aware that they need their peripheries in order to
develop…and keep their place the world economy” (2002).
That being said, the metropolitan scale of intervention and
urban governance during the Fordist era, though functional
in that epoch, lost legitimacy as it did not embody the
institutional tools need int the Post-Fordist era. Under
Fordist modes of accumulation and regulation, there was
a constant redistribution of economic development across
metropolitan areas, with interventions being implemented
in ascribed and defined geographic areas. As economies
and modes of accumulation have shifted, Post-Fordist
regimes articulated the need to enhance and stimulate
globally competitive place-making initiatives to attract
capital and generate endogenous economic growth.
With an evolution to a Post-Fordist capital regime and
retrenchment of the Fordist welfare state, there is a friction
of modes of regulation and modes of accumulation of two
diverging regimes in juxtaposing spatial organizations.
Localist planning is thus a response to the inequities
and inefficiencies generated by past, authoritative and
redistributive metropolitan planning institutions and an
effort to cope with Fordist, Keynesian welfare state service
retrenchment.
Localist policy agendas in response to metropolitan
government coordination have arisen for a number of
reasons. Supporters of a localist agenda claim that the
“incentive for participation is in immediate neighborhoods”
is “strongest” and note that “informal contacts” between
them and identifies with them” (Lefebvre, 1998). What
remains crucial in this regard is the “recognition” of the
metropolitan government’s authority by citizens, local
authorities and “pressure groups” in the area. Lefebvre
observes, however, that “existing local governments always
have looked unfavorably upon the appearance of new
autonomous and powerful political structures in a given
territorial organization that would call into question the
legitimacy and authority of the existing system” (1998).
Lefebvre ends his remarks with a cautionary quote
highlighting the importance of metropolitan government.
He states that,
if the central cities agree to play the game, it is because they are now aware that they need the peripheries in order to develop, or quite simply to keep their place, in the ranks of world cities. The urban hierarchy of today is international. The globalization of the economy has once again meant that the economy and functional considerations are factors which make the introduction of metropolitan governments necessary, no longer to provide urban services, but infrastructures and facilities that a world metropolis, a European town, must have if it wishes to continue to play a major international role (1998).
Lefebvre, in this statement recalls that it is precisely for
the sake of economic competitiveness and continued
development in a globally competitive market that
collaborative metropolitan planning must be considered
as essential in polycentric urban regions. Given the
evolution of urban systems into polycentric urban
regions, the re-emergence of metropolitan governments
and governance systems is crucial for continued socio-
economic competitiveness in a globalized economy.
CHAPTER 3: WHITHER METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE? 33
needs. The inability of local governments to respond to
the authority of regional governance networks results in an
exacerbation of geographies of socio-economic despair at
the metropolitan level. Attention to context in this regard
is crucial to the success of regional projects imbedded in
the local urban areas. At the same time, as observed by
Brenner, the evolution of technology has lead to a shift in
the development of functional urban systems. Central city
governments are recognizing the fact that competitiveness
and urban vitality in a global era are indelibly tied to the
capacity to mobilize initiatives that integrate regional
economies of scale into one functional urban system
(Brenner, 2003). The torch of localism was taken up
as a response to the seemingly mechanical functional
organization and image of the metropolitan city; as the
power of metropolitan authorities being progressively
dismantled, urban regional policy coordination faded from
political conscious and concern. That being said, central
city governments are increasingly being confronted with
constraints in the form of ascribed geographic boundaries
to their institutional spheres of influence and the limitations
of such localist tendencies in urban policy formation.
These constraints in collaboration and service provision
now in turn translate into constraints in “promoting the
territorial competitiveness and attracting external capital
investment” (Brenner, 2003). Brenner thus notes that,
the defeat of more comprehensive metropolitan reform initiatives has generated a new momentum for compromise solutions that address regional governance problems through informal partnerships, interorganizational coordination and public-private cooperation (2003).
The seeming paralysis of metropolitan governance
and service provision because of local institutional
fragmentation, however, still needs to be addressed. While
in the past metropolitan governance organization solutions
have tended toward Lefebvre’s concept of “supramunicipal”
organization, today, solutions are instead being generated
based on the “intermunicipal model”. Politicians, planners
citizens and officials at a local level constitute a stronger
form of political action than “voting alone” (Cashin, 2000).
Local governments, similarly, would be more efficient to
compete for “consumer voters” through the best bundle
of “service provision, generating a mosaic of local choice
at the metropolitan level. Finally, the “alienation” of the
individual in the metropolitan community is mitigated by
more local forms of civic participation. Local commitments
and interests, thus generate local political participation and
an active local citizenry. The torch of localism in the 20th
century was thus taken up as a socio-political response
to the authoritative and seemingly mechanical nature of
central city and metropolitan government organizations.
In her 2002 work, Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism, Sheryll Cashin presents the normative case
for enhancing the power of local municipal organizations.
One of the most interesting arguments put forth by Cashin
is the conviction that families in suburbia sought to use
local municipal incorporation to control local development
and prevent the expansion of larger central city neighbors.
Local zoning codes, in response to the expansionist nature
of Fordist city governments, was encouraged by state and
national law specifically in the United States (Cahsin,
2000). In juxtaposition to the seemingly unwieldy and
corrupt central city political systems, local governments
were seen as an ideal level of service provision because they
provide the most direct forum for democratic participation,
the most “efficient” form of service provision and the
strongest generator of a sense of feeling (2000). As the
scale and interventions of metropolitan administrations
became more detached from day to day functions of urban
systems, they began to lose the legitimacy of recognition
by the local populace, inciting local protective measures
to encourage endogenous economic growth and ensure a
sustained quality of life and public administrative services.
3.5 NEW REGIONALISM: LOCALIZED REGIONALISM?
The Post-Fordist era of metropolitan planning was marked
by a mismatch and friction of regional policy with local
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS34
some ways and neglecting in others. Local governments
respond by retrenching in their circumscribed powers
and providing local services. As urban areas continue to
grow and develop, this cycle is multiplied at the periphery.
Without an overarching regional government coordinating
policy, local jurisdictions respond by incorporating local
government policies to ensure quality of life and service
provision. Growth and development of metropolitan areas
in a context of a lack of policy coordination, thus leads
to further fragmentation (Carruthers, 2003). As a result,
central cities remain with their hands tied, in need of
providing infrastructural and services at a regional level
to foster economic vitality in increasingly regional urban
productive and social systems, but only being to act within
their jurisdictions.
This cycle that has paralyzed urban regional governance
is known as “fragmentation” of local governance system.
Many scholars of urban regional governance have alluded
to such fragmentation and the dangers that it presents in
terms of long term socioeconomic vitality, but solutions
to such a problem remain limited. While there have been
some successful experiments in the implementation of
intramunicipal, collaborative, New Regionalist policy, city
regional planning institutions today still face institutional
barriers.
The cautionary words of scholars like Lefebvre and Brenner,
however, serve as tools for first, dissecting the problem of
institutional fragmentation then generating possible policy
solutions. The issue of institutional fragmentation arises
from a mismatch between the functional urban region and
the institutional urban region, with populations recognizing
the legitimacy of local governments over regional
authorities. Brenner notes that, “the process of globalization
is creating denser socio-economic interdependencies on
urban regional scales that generally supersede the reach
of these (local) administrative levels” (1998). In his opinion,
“geographic scales come to operate as sites and stakes of
socio-political struggle” presupposing “a relatively fixed
urban and regional jurisdictional framework” within which
“the regulatory preconditions for capitalist urbanization
and scholars have realized that, in order to generate
a sense of identification from individual citizens with
more extensive levels and geographies of institutional
organization requires the activation of civic participation
and collaboration deriving from primary local self
interest. New Regionalism “accepts the futility of seeking
consolidated metropolitan” government and instead
focuses on “attempts to bridge metropolitan social and
fiscal inequities with regional governance structures, or for
a for robust collaboration that do not completely supplant
local governments” (Cashin, 2002). Projects respond to
localist issues concerning the determination of community
self interest by operating in governance projects that derive
from “grass roots coalitions” and policies of “smart growth
and sustainable development” (Cashin, 2002). The notion
that individual action has a regional impact and that no
community can truly “go it alone” in stemming issues of
pollution and traffic congestion becomes in this sense a
starting off point for more collaborative policy initiatives at
the metropolitan level. The resulting governance network
is one that emerges “as a product of the system of actors
as the process of institutional reform unfolds” (Brenner,
2003), without prescriptively emanating from higher levels
of government.
3.6 INSTITUTIONAL “FRAGMENTATION”: THE
PROBLEM AT HAND
It can be concluded that there has been a historically
evolutionary cycle where by local administrations retrench
in local interests in service provision because there is a
vacuum of such services emanating from a regional level,
rebuffing power for the sake of local socioeconomic
interest. While local interests retrench and drawn distinct
boundaries to buffer against the clout of central cities in
the forms of local zoning codes and transit policy, central
cities instead are vying and negotiating with the very same
peripheral local governments to support regional projects
outside their circumscribed boundaries. City governments
mismatch regional and local interests, asserting in
CHAPTER 3: WHITHER METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE? 35
of spaces and governance networks needing and often
failing to coordinate in metropolitan planning initiatives.
• It is the fragmentation of government institutions and
spatial systems leads to problems in the conception
of metropolitan urban projects and mismatch between
institutional and functional urban systems. The
evolution of contemporary cityscapes is the product of
complex processes of growth and development. The
city has grown and developed into an urban system,
an amalgamation of spaces and places, functionally
linked by transportation and digital telecommunications
infrastructure and regionally distributed beyond core
urban area boundaries. The functional reach of this
system passes well beyond the form currently being acted
within. While there is a need for projects that service this
metropolitan dimension of urban living, currently there
are no institutions capable of proposing, developing
or generating consensus around such needs. While
boundaries on a map do not reflect the functioning and
complexity of contemporary urban systems, governance
structures of these spatial artifices lack the tools and
know how needed to deal with such complexity.
• Conflict and deadlock among actors derives from the
need to work within dated institutions to plan for regional
issues and a constant vying for power within dated
institutional constructs. Governance tools and practices
inherited from antiquated government constructs do
not reflect the complex realities of contemporary urban
systems. There is however a retrenchment of control on
the part of governance institutions and vying to maintain
pertinence in an otherwise constantly evolving context.
Contemporary urban systems are built on the exchange
of services and ideas in the knowledge economy and
hyper-connected through innovations in transportation
and communication technology. The Internet is growing
as a tool of communication and exchange between city
governments, citizens, visitors and businesses and the
are secured” (Brenner, 1998). This is to say that
governments and governance networks are products of
local and regional socio-political and economic dynamics,
responding to and reflecting the needs of the functional
urban system. Localist and “fragmentative” policy is an
institutional response and defense to preconceived notions
of metropolitan governance; they represent an enduring
culture of response and reaction to the past mismanaging
of metropolitan governance. Defusing the arguments
in favor of localism thus requires a tailoring of regional
collaborative efforts to suit local needs.
3.7 CONCLUSION
While experimentation with local regionalism is generating
momentum, new outlets need to be generated to continue
political progress that has been made. While such outlets
will be discussed in the following chapter of this thesis,
what can be concluded from research conducted in
chapters two and three thus far is that:
• Fragmentation is caused by the fact that, as cities grow,
institutions have not caught up with the new complexities
posed by contemporary urban systems. In the past there
has been a parallel evolution between urban spaces
and planning institutions. This is to say that, with the
evolution of more complex spatial forms, governance
institutions have evolved for needed organizational and
coordination activity. Today, as cities grow and develop,
governance institutions have not been able to account or
plan for growing complexity of urban socio-spatial forms.
As observed by Fernandez Maldonando, contemporary
urban governance built on the management of nodes;
of urban centers; and of the control and forming of
spaces in these nodes; with flows projecting well beyond
these boundaries in the ICT error, new problems arise for
local governments in managing urban planning issues
again. There is a friction of regimes, with the evolution
into a “space of flows” without a resulting evolution of
governance (2004). The result is a fragmented system
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS36
base at which this knowledge economy functions. External
linkages and internal divisions in urban systems are growing.
There is, however, no spatial or governance dimension to
reflect and ascribe this shift in functional organization
and problem framework being accounted for by current
paradigms. While current strategies of intervention do not
meet the exigencies of such a constantly developing and
evolving spatial form, urban projects servicing this need
could serve as the “service” generated by metropolitan
governments to meet an ongoing need.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS40
compel institutions to move toward a network governance
framework to establish cross-jurisdictional solutions to the
problems of metropolitan fragmentation. The chapter will
propose a theoretical framework for understanding the
activities of mitigation in a system of functional mismatch
discussed in the previous chapter. It will show that,
through the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies, governance networks can affectively adapt
to and mitigate the problem of mismatch by changing the
dimension, scale and scope of their operations. Specific
examples of how digital telecommunications technologies
induce changes in governance systems and change the
roles of actors in governance networks will be discussed.
It will ultimately be proven that the installation of digital
telecommunication technologies and the servicing of
urban regional populations induces shifts in scale of urban
regional actor networks, mitigating the mismatch between
institutional and functional regional systems.
Information and theoretical frameworks constructed in
the following chapters of this thesis derive from literary
research and direct observation based on interviews
with relevant actors in the region of Emilia Romagna.
Voices and perceptions of these actors will provide a first
understanding of reconfiguring of urban regional actor
networks. Case explorations will specify these observations
in Chapter Five of the thesis.
4.2 THESIS HYPOTHESIS
Purely metropolitan or purely local government and
governance models do not fit the socio-spatial complexities
4.1 INTRODUCTION
The first half of this thesis was dedicated to understanding
the impacts that society has on space, studying such
evolution through the theoretical lens of the socio-spatial
dialectic. The first chapter of this thesis presented an
organizational structure for later arguments made. The
second chapter of this thesis charted the evolutionary
trend and nexus between space and society, providing
evidence that societal changes shape urban spatial forms
and governance patterns and vice versa. Chapter Two
depicted and discussed the changes to urban spaces and
urban governance networks in the modern era. The third
chapter of this thesis focused on the problems faced by
urban governance networks in light of changes and shifts in
the socio-spatial configuration of modern urban systems.
The concept of “mismatch” was introduced and discussed
to highlight the differences between functional capacity
of urban governance networks and the organization of
the spatial system in which they operate. While the city
exists as rich territorial system, it was argued that the scale
of intervention of urban governance networks is limited
to more localized boundaries, thus rendering urban
governance networks ineffective in the dealing with more
complex, systemic urban problems.
The second half of this thesis, starting with Chapter Four,
is instead dedicated to studying the impact that urban
spatial organization has on urban social configuration. The
fourth chapter of this thesis will move from a discussion
of problems to a discussion policy processes in urban
regional governance network reconfiguration. It will
propose that emerging urban regional forms require and
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE 41
metropolitan government becomes intermunicipal
metropolitan governance coordination, with objects of
policy shifting from places to places and populations for
service provision.
4.3.1 REGIONAL COORDINATION, LOCAL PROJECTS
Emerging urban regional forms that multiply and layer social
spatial scale and meaning require a similar shift in scales of
governance. As the scale and complexities of urban systems
increase, so to does the creativity of governance networks
need to increase to promote projects and collaboration at
the functional urban region level. Local boundaries and
localist governance tendencies, institutional legacies from
past epochs of capital organization, limit such regional
planning initiatives. The resulting fragmented governance
context leads to inefficiencies and overlaps in service
provision and the exacerbation of socio-spatial inequality
at the metropolitan scale.
To balance out the multi-scalar exigencies of urban
regional systems, regional collaboration and coordination
of city regional dynamics now as “cross jurisdictional
problems require cross jurisdictional solutions” (Katz,
2000). This is because, as noted by Brenner, “local
government boundaries do not necessarily coincide
with the fluid zones of urban labor and commodity
markets or infrastructural formation… local jurisdictions
frequently divide rather than unify the urban region, thus
emphasizing the segmentations rather than the tendency
toward structured coherence and class alliance formation”
(2003). There exists a need to bring region wide problems
and projects to move the debate forward and generate this
cross-jurisdictional collaboration.
It is the opinion of the researchers of this thesis that digital
telecommunications technologies are an “open source
infrastructure”, whose installation, use and modification
is managed by individual users. Governance, making use
of this infrastructure can too move to be “open sourced”
responding to social rather than geographic realities.
Making use of such initiatives, urban regional governance
networks can respond to populations AND places, by acting
beyond traditional geographic boundaries. Using evolving
urban spatial systems and technological innovations to
redefine existing governance networks induces changes
in scale and scope of policy intervention. Such change
is achieved through enhancing coordination in regional
governance networks without creating new layers of
government.
4.3 METROPOLITAN PLANNING STRATEGY FOR
FRAGMENTED CONTEXTS
Mismatch of urban functional and urban institutional
systems requires multi-scalar coordination approach
focusing on populations. The tools to arrive to new forms of
collaboration are instead embodied in network governance
strategies that combine regional coordination and local
articulation of policy in cross-jurisdictional projects. Shifts
focus on a change in scale and scope of metropolitan
and urban regional policy intervention. Supramunicipal Figure 4-1 ; schematic representation of the integration of regional coordination with locally articulated projects
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS42
challenges, emerging spaces generate new urban social
organizations to eventually be responded to with specific
services by urban governance networks. Modes of capital
accumulation require a shift in modes of capital regulation
in evolving urban systems.
Working on interfaces with urban populations builds
legitimacy and recognition of the regional project and
provides for a local identification with new regional
collaborative entities. In the case of the emerging urban
regional systems, it has been demonstrated that existing
boundaries do not respond to regional needs. Urban
systems are evolving to a regional scale with glocally-
linked users that often traverse institutional boundaries in
daily life patterns. The concept of citizen has morphed into
a concept of user of multiple and overlapping territorial
socio-spatial systems. The movement of people and
exchange of ideas compels government to shift to meet
and service urban regional needs.
In an effort to respond to emerging spatial systems and
operating at a regional and local scale, urban regional
governance networks must be linked to space through
imagining and responding to user populations, and not
just places. Populations operate at an urban regional scale;
in an effort to circumvent the constraints of boundaries,
interventions servicing populations and the needs of
populations will in turn continue to redefine space. h
Regional solutions linked with local project articulations
must focus on first defining then providing for key
urban regional populations for policy implementation.
Responses to these populations morph the scale and
scope of governance interventions and ultimate induces
government to respond to the complexities of emerging
urban regional systems.
efforts have to be complimented by and articulated with
local project interventions.
Regionally coordinated and locally articulated policy and
project initiatives are effective in mitigating the challenges
of governance fragmentation because they promote
cross-jurisdictional collaboration through a mechanism
that comprises regional and local interests in inter-
municipal metropolitan planning contexts. While a regional
vision concerning urban project implementation and
coordination efforts is crucial, it can also limit the attention
of larger scale governance networks to local interests and
local urban socio-spatial specificities. Local governance
networks conversely are capable of capturing such socio-
spatial specificities, but lack the vision and power needed
to effectively impact the “bigger picture”. The merging of
the two thus incorporates needed intermunicipal (and not
supramunicipal) collaboration with scale initiatives at the
local level that generate a local sense of identification with
ongoing projects.
Such a general policy goal is a summation of complicated
processes of communication and collaboration, involving
regional networks of interaction, information exchange and
coordination between local and regional actors. Strategies
work in an in between scale that is neither regional nor
local, operating in policy space of overlapping regional
jurisdictions to cover populations of users. Policies operate
at a none-scale that engages varying levels of urban actor
networks in the co-creation of a specific, urban regional
planning agenda.
4.3.2 POPULATION ORIENTED SERVICES
As was noted by Knox and Pinch and demonstrated in
the first chapters of this thesis, societal changes induce
an evolution of space through a process of functional
adaptation and appropriation. Such activity is conversely
complimented by space inducing a reorganization
of societal constructs. Presenting new organizational
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE 43
functional urban regional systems.
The socio-organizational theory of “boundary objects”
explains the dynamics and the processes whereby the use
and the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies induce shifts in urban regional governance
networks, has been applied to this study. The theory shows
that the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies in urban regional governance mitigates
institutional and functional mismatch by operating in
the dimension of policy formation process and policy
organization; creating new forums for information exchange
and collaboration between regional actors.
A boundary object specifically is a socio-organizational
construct that serves as a common project or debate in
interdisciplinary policy making. Different groups of actors
from varying educational and professional backgrounds are
confronted with and respond to a collective organizational
problem that, in the process, becomes a source of
information exchange between these different groups.
4.4 DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
AS BOUNDARY OBJECTS
The complexities of interconnectivity deriving from the
adoption of digital telecommunications technologies can
serve as a powerful tool in aiding the reconfiguation of
region governance coordination to focus both on multiple
scales of intervention and user populations to ultimately
mitigate the problem of regional governance mismatch.
As was presented in the quote of Saint Exupéry at
the beginning of this thesis, common projects create
new collective identities. Digital telecommunications
technologies serve not just as a tool to enhance
connectivity and collaboration in urban regional policy, but
also an object of collective experimentation, dialogue and
debate amongst regional and local actors to reconfigure
and expand urban governance networks. In the same way
that such technologies induce changes in urban spatial
dimensions, digital telecommunications technologies also
induce changes in the configuration and the activity of
urban governance networks to respond to the needs of
Figure 4-2 ; a schematic representation of the role of the movement of populations in redefining governance network boundaries
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS44
provision. By focusing on the application of digital
telecommunications technologies to policy targeting
cross-jurisdictional collaboration and urban populations,
governance networks experience collaborative dialogues at
new levels of policy intervention that then serve to ascribe
and redefine institutional systems to functional systems of
urban spaces.
4.5 DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
AND PARALLEL DEVELOPMENT IN URBAN REGIONAL
GOVERNANCE NETWORK DEVELOPMENT
Digital telecommunications technologies in urban policy
serve as catalysts that induce shifts in metropolitan and
urban regional governance networks from one form of
capital regulation to another because technologies redefine
the networks organized around specific technology
epochs. They serve similarly as a tool of communication
and object of ongoing project work through plans focused
on servicing urban regional populations to respond
to urban regional spatial configurations by different
actors operating at both the regional and local level.
Understanding the mechanisms but which these shifts
occur allow for reshaping and reconfiguring of regional
actor dynamics and a mitigation of the problems of scalar
mismatch in urban policy application. Manipulating urban
regional actor network dynamics in this shifting period
allows for a manipulation of scale or scales, and objects
of intervention, inducing a shift in the role of urban
governance.
Applying the concept of boundary object analysis to
urban governance networks, it can be first noted in the
functional adaptation and appropriation of technological
resources induces initial shifts and changes in network
actors. Digital telecommunications technologies in urban
governance contexts are “weakly structured in common
use, and become strongly structured in individual-site
use” and thus are readily adaptable to the needs of
individual users (Star and Griesemer, 1989). This means
Scholarly debate and discussions of boundary objects
refer to them as a theoretical tool of “collective invention
in the creation of a new operating concept” (Virkkunen,
2007). Such entities are symbols “needed to focus actor
attention and to direct development towards” a common
developmental or evolutional goal (Virkkunen, 2007). It is
a technological tool common to multiple disciplines, but
where “users (in each discipline) find different problems
and possibilities for development…applying in different
contexts and for different purposes” a given technology
in “parallel activity systems” (Virkkunen, 2007). The
interdisciplinary overlap of use of a boundary object
allows it to be a form of communication between actors
in different informational networks. Serving as a catalyst
for information exchange, boundary objects multiply
connections between actors that otherwise would not have
been incited to debate, dialogue or collaborate to solve an
otherwise collective problem.
Digital telecommunications technologies represent a
common forum of policy experimentation and service
Figure 4-3 ; a schematic representation of knowledge transfer in a boundary object scenario
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE 45
into and resembling a constantly modifiable open source
software. Infrastructural investments such as digital
communications cabling, wireless service provision and
e-governance development require long term planning,
collective problem solving and shifts in actor network
organization and collaboration.
In urban regional actor networks, the first dimension
of exchange that is fundamentally impacted by the
introduction of digital telecommunications technologies
is the dimension of communication. Through the
implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies, there is a quantitative increase in the
amount of connections between actors in a given network
both in the process of initial installation of infrastructure
and in the process of understanding how to better furnish
services in a digital telecommunications technologies
framework. The ability to communicate with actors at in
a closer distance in a faster and more integrated way has
the added benefit of strengthening relationships and ties
previously established through by facilitating and opening
new forums of information exchange. Local actors are
able to share more information and communicate more
effectively, thus aiding in the efforts to build consensus on
policy interventions in governance networks. A quantitative
increase in connections between actors is coupled with a
quantitative increase in the scale of communication. The
ability to connect with actors at a farther distance effectively
increases the scale and possibilities of interaction. The use
of digital telecommunications technologies is intangible
and is thus not confined to conventional notions of
boundaries that limit the scale and effectiveness of urban
governance network project interventions. While in the
past communication and collaboration between actors was
limited by geography and technology, the introduction of
digital telecommunications technologies has allowed for
a change in the scale and dimension of these activities.
Unconstrained by conventional boundaries and networks
of information exchange, actors can think beyond the
local but below the regional; a semi space to which urban
systems have currently evolved, directing and evolving
action to suit the needs of individual users that operate in
that digital telecommunications technologies, though
common to many users, are specially adapted and fine
tuned in the needs of a specific user group. That being
said, they serve as a shared point of reference in ongoing
project work, allowing for a transmission of information
across “different social worlds” (Star and Griesemer, 1989).
Digital telecommunications technologies do “not require
coordination through a hierarchy, but the creation of an
infrastructure…” that serves as a “mutual point of reference
to promote collaboration (Star and Griesemer, 1989).
In the case of technological introduction in urban regional
governance networks, there is a process of parallel
development. Parallel Development refers to the fact that an
external social or technological change will be distributed
amongst actors in a network equally. Responses to these
changes will largely be informed by past experiences and
by the “tools” available to actors to effectively adapt to
change. Each actor will thus initially operate independently
to understand the possible applications and implications
of technological and social change, internalizing and
appropriating those elements of technological change
most suited to current activity.
4.6 DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
AND COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION IN
URBAN REGIONAL GOVERNANCE NETWORKS
In the works of Knox and Pinch, it was asserted that
digital telecommunications technologies not only allow
for more long distance communication, but also similarly
allow for the expansion and refinement of local ties in a
given actor network (2000). The implementation of digital
telecommunications technologies leads to a process of
“co-configuration…based even more on the utilization
of new information and communication technologies to
create a…customer intelligent product, collaborative value
creation and spur continuous redevelopment” (Virkkunen,
2007). The aim is to “extend horizontal collaboration” and
“collective active” with human systems often morphing
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS46
technological innovation…every technological revolution
has led to new opportunities for organization work and
production” (Puustinen and Kangasina, 2010). Networks
organized around a specific technological and technical
epochs are riddled with “complex networks of codes and
nodes of interests and actors” (Puustinen and Kangasina
2010). The process of creative destruction of capital
regimes is a cyclical transformation in which the “logic of
activity changes” is an opportunity to induce a “collective
expansive learning “ that is typically a “long term, complex
process in which actors continuously encounter new
contradictions that they much overcome” (Puutisen and
Kangasjoa 2010).
After an initial process of parallel development, there is
process of shifting dialogues. Shifting Dialogues refer to the
fact that given an external technological or social change,
actors in a governance network, upon internalization of
socio-technological changes and recognition of redefined
roles based on socio-technological change, recognize
each other as possessing different resources that were not
previously considered in response to growing problems
and “mismatches” between urban form and function. As
a result, there is a shifting of dialogue and roles between
varying actors, a “mutual adjustment” in role redefinition
in city and region wide service provision where different
resources are employed and where different actors
collaborate.
Both the processes of parallel development and shifting
dialogues serve as tools to mitigate the gap in organizational
capacity between urban governance networks and the
systems in which they operate. It is the functional adaptation
of governance, the “shifting dialogues” and networks of
collaboration that is most important to understand ways to
mitigate functional mismatch. After an initial technological
shift, local and regional urban actor networks realign in the
reconfiguration and reapplication of their expertise in a
new socio-technological context.
Actors in a given network, in light of expanded
multiple geographic and spatial systems.
The second dimension of urban governance culture
that is fundamentally impacted by the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies is the
dimension of collaboration. The implementation of digital
telecommunications technologies induces increased
communication and gives rise to a process whereby actors
develop and reevaluate their roles and competencies within
a specific urban governance network. The introduction
of digital telecommunications technologies becomes a
mechanism of forced collaboration, whereby actors not
only quantitatively increase the number of connections in
a given network, but also qualitatively increase dialogues
between one another. Actors engage in “partisan mutual
adjustment” in this regard and shift in their relative scales
and scopes of intervention through ongoing dialogues
and collaborative efforts to effectively engage and prepare
for technological change and thus redefine their roles in
a given actor network. Emerging spatial configurations,
regimes of accumulations, challenge governance regimes
to respond with new regimes of regulation. Collaborative
activity induces a shift to urban regional governance
networks, operating at simultaneous scales and responds
to the needs of populations and outside conventional
urban hierarchies.
4.7 DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
AND SHIFTING DIALOGUES IN URBAN REGIONAL
GOVERNANCE NETWORKS
The plan to implement projects in the realm of digital
connectivity is a boundary object for local and regional
actors to respond to shifts in regimes of capital
accumulation. A shift in functional space induces a shift
in social organizations, with regimes of capital regulation
responding to the emerging needs of regimes of capital
accumulation. As mentioned in the works of Brenner
in previous chapters of this thesis, “progress from one
stage to the next has always required technical and/or
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE 47
network of actors that normally may not exchange ideas or
engage in collaborative activities.
Through the dimensions of communication and
collaboration, the installation and the use of digital
telecommunications technologies effectively serve to
change the dynamics of urban governance networks and
promote this shift from hierarchy to network structure.
Governance shifts from hierarchy to a horizontal network
of engaged actors with subsidiary capacities to effect
changes in urban systems. Such shifts in dynamics stem
from dialogues and collaborative activities engaging both
the physical installation of digital telecommunications
infrastructure and the social adaptation to and appropriation
of digital telecommunications technologies infrastructure
once it has been installed. New forms of collaboration
in urban governance culture develop in response to a
need generated by service provision to individual users.
Responses to user populations take on new scales of policy
communication and collaboration because of socio-
spatial and technological transitions, revaluate roles in
given policy contexts. The main evolution in urban regional
governance, the shifting dialogues of the introduction of
digital telecommunications technologies, that occurs in
light of the implementation and experimentation with digital
telecommunications technologies is a transition from a
hierarchical, directive structure of urban governance to a
network and collaborative structure of urban governance.
This structure eliminates different scales of governance
intervention, and instead allows for the simultaneous
activation of policy at multiple scales and responding to
the needs of urban regional populations.
There is an inherent network structure of actors in different
social groups posturing around and experimenting with a
common technology or tool, or boundary object. This object
or tool ultimately becomes a means by which information
about use and application is exchanged across a given
Figure 4-4 ; a schematic representation of the transition of urban governance networks from systems of hierarchy to networks
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS48
4.8.1 NETWORK INSTALLATION
Spatial infrastructural projects create new institutional
boundaries of intervention for urban regional governance
networks. Infrastructural installation is the product of
a dialogue between actors in region and local levels of
government. It is also the product of dialogues and
negotiations between public and private service providers
in a given macro geographic jurisdiction. In physical
infrastructural interventions regional actors engage with
local actors to construct an infrastructure that will provide
for cost effective implementation to enhance dialogue.
The implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies in this regard follows suite because it is
achieved with the installing of a system of DSL cables
in a given territory. Such a constraint induces dialogue
between varying levels of government. Governance
networks at a regional level consult with and engage
local governance networks to effectively understand local
territorial opportunities and constraints in the installation
of DSL cable infrastructure.
While the installation of digital telecommunications
technologies infrastructure provokes new dialogues
between varying levels of government, it also serves to
provoke dialogues between private and public service
providers. The construction of a new DSL cable network
requires the installation of a new series of piping and
tubing at a regional territorial level. The construction
of such an extensive network of new piping and tubing
is expensive to either the regional service provider or
local service users depending on the business model
ultimately implemented and where the costs are ultimately
distributed. Running DSL cabling through existing tubing
networks however, eliminates the need to install costly
new infrastructure. Installation efforts go beyond digital
cable installation. Wireless Hotspot (WiFi) installation in
urban environments opens another dimension to shifting
dialogues. Wireless Infrastructure, and specifically wireless
routers require negotiations between public institutions
and project intervention conforming to the need of the
functional urban regional system. Such policies ultimately
are spatially rooted in urban regional systems through
their targeting of urban regional populations moving and
living beyond traditional urban boundaries.
4.8 DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
AND URBAN REGIONAL GOVERNANCE NETWORK
PROJECTS
The introduction of digital telecommunications technologies
has had an unprecedented impact on perceptions of and
limitations posed by distance and time. This being said,
such perceptions and communications are redefined
starting with individual user and actor populations. The
impact on urban spatial and governance organization
is an indirect function of the changes in cultures of
communication of various urban populations. Forced to
respond to urban populations in emerging and constantly
reconfiguring urban regional spatial organizations, cultures
of governance are compelled to change to meet service
needs.
Shifts in urban regional governance networks are the
products of implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies in three policy and project dimensions. These
inititatives, that take the form of regional policy and plans,
are the boundary objects of common collaboration that aid
in inducing shifts in urban regional governance networks.
These three activities in particular are: installation,
servicing and regulating of digital telecommunications
infrastructures. These activities vary in both scale and
scope of intervention and engage different types of actors
in a given urban governance network, providing for the
long term boundary object necessary to motivate actors to
collaborate and ultimate induce shifts in scale and object
of policy implementation.
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE 49
Service provision, unlike the example of infrastructural
installation, induces new forms of collaboration between
public and private actors at the local and regional level
and challenges local actors to experiment with new forms
of communication, tailoring and enhancing services to
the online world and user populations. Local governments
change from a position of providing specific services to
citizens to a position of mediating the provision of services
to citizens from private service providers. The city changes
its role to that of a negotiator and “guide” of public project
interests, that in the process allows for an expansion of
service interest beyond the constraints of local boundaries.
Internet connectivity and service provision is delegated to
a private interest, with a vision for provision that is shaped
and negotiated by the city government, that is ultimately
aimed at targeting populations that act upon urban spaces
and have multiple life patterns in functional urban regional
systems.
With the introduction of digital telecommunications
technologies and services, city governments are forced to
generate local solutions to provide Internet connectivity
to user populations on one hand, while updating and
modifying the legibility of existing services in the
administration on the other, all with the aim of enhancing
the interface with and voice of local user populations in
online dialogues.
4.8.3 NETWORK REGULATION
A final lens of analysis in studying the evolution of urban
governance networks is instead related to regulation
of online activity. New infrastructure and new services
require new forms of institutional cooperation and
regulation. Providing wireless or other forms of Internet
connectivity requires a series of safety measures such as
the authentication of users, the limitation of connection
time in public networks, the enforcement of privacy
and security of usership and finally the limitation of
accessibility to specific online sources. Such regulation
and private service Internet service providers. While WiFi
Hotspots do not embody a physical spatial intervention,
they not only have an impact on the use of public space,
but on governance network coordination to ultimately
install the routers.
In responding to the reconfiguration of the urban functional
system given the addition of a new layer of infrastructural
investment, the institutional system redefines its scale
and scope of policy intervention, creating new interfaces
with urban regional populations. The installation of a
new technology requires the opening of new dialogues
between actors at both the regional and local level and
thus can serve induce processes of shifting dialogue in
urban governance networks and the scale of project
intervention. Actors are compelled to communicate to
effectively complete an infrastructural project, an increase
in communication after installation opens new discussions
about effective policy applications of a given technology.
Given an initial installation of digital telecommunications
technologies, an increase in communication between
actors in an urban governance network, there is an
increase in the discussions and understanding of how to
effectively use the technology and furnish services at an
urban regional level.
4.8.2 NETWORK SERVICING
A second lens of analysis in studying the evolution of
urban governance networks and step in inducing shifts in
urban governance network coordination is instead related
to the provision of online services. While in the past urban
governance networks targeted service provision through
spatial modification, with network servicing there is a shift
to a meditative role between local actors and creating a
legible organizational structure and interface with urban
regional populations. Projects are focused on targeting
populations and not just places and serve as a strategic
interface with populations crucial for building governance
network legitimacy.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS50
administrative bodies.
In both these cases, changes in both communication
and collaboration between actors serve most notably to
highlight gaps in the ability of governance networks to
effectively intervene in the functioning of wider urban
systems. With the installation of digital telecommunications
technologies, there is a process by which actors revaluate
roles and relative positions in governance networks to
respond to changing needs of their given constituencies.
Such a vying for pertinence in this sense is crucial because
it provides a link by which actors turn to each other in an
effort to fill functional needs at a wider scale. While no new
layers of government are created, actors are compelled
to create new network of connections and open new
dialogues to engage in the wider urban regional system.
4.8 CONCLUSION
Chapter Four has been dedicated to charting a theoretical
framework for understanding what forms of cross-
jurisdictional collaboration are needed to mitigate
the problems of mismatch between functional and
institutional urban systems. The chapter has also been
a study in how urban regional governance networks
can induce shifts to accommodate new forms of cross-
jurisdictional collaboration through the implementation of
digital telecommunications technologies. In particular, it
was noted that:
• new urban regional spatial systems generate a need
for a the construction of a new institutional system
• strategies to accommodate urban regional spatial
systems should focus on coordination at multiple scales
and targeting the needs of user populations, agents that
circumvent socio-political boundaries.
• plans for the implementation of digital
telecommunications technologies serve as boundary
objects for urban regional governance networks to
systems have costs related to monitoring of user activity
and of coordination of resources between different actors
involved in authenticating and monitoring usership.
Thinking about a regional system or provision of Internet
services, it becomes essential to open dialogues between
major organizations in the city that cover a majority of users
in order to effectively provide internet connectivity and
online services to citizens at a city and region wide scale.
This is to say that, city and region wide public and private
actors move to create “federations” of authentication of
usership to ultimately cover all users in the same online
service network at the city level. Such federations induce
new operative dialogues and forms of information sharing
between city and regional institutions. Institutions may be
fixed in geographic space, but online space represents a
possibility to redefine cultures and scales of collaboration
at a metropolitan and regional level. Service sharing in
this regard in the provision of Internet connectivity a new
opportunity to reform governance culture, as seen in
examples of waste disposal and transportation policy in
new regionalist coordination schemes
4.7.4 NETWORK PROJECTS SUMMARY
A number of common logical threads can be woven
through these three areas of intervention.
First, the changing face of the institution vis-à-vis the
individual user to an online service provider is an important
impetus for shifts in governance networks.
Secondly, in this shift, there is a similar shift to identify
and open dialogues with populations rather than places,
focusing on services and dialogues with individual users
that may embody and live with in many different functional
geographies. Finally, there is an opening of new forms of
collaboration and information exchange, as the Internet is
used not just as a tool but mutual point of reference and
collective project for information exchange between public
CHAPTER 4: NETWORK GOVERNANCE 51
open new forms of collaboration and communication
regarding a collective project and change scales and
scopes of policy intervention
• shifts and communication in light of the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies leads to
changes scale and scope of intervention to ultimately
be used to mitigate mismatch between functional and
institutional urban systems
The conclusions will be expanded upon with and affirmed
by specific project details highlighted in the case studies
in Chapter Five of this thesis.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS54
observational and participatory experiences in the realm
of regional and local digital telecommunications policy in
Italian contexts. Studies and observations will be analyzed
to generate a series of policy recommendations for digital
telecommunications policy application to break mismatch
in urban regional systems. The aim of the chapter will be to
evince different dimensions of network governance policy
and project initiatives and conclude with a cohesive set of
recommendations to be applied in the final two chapters
of the thesis.
5.2 CASE EXPLORATIONS
Two cases were explored in depth to the highlight the
complexities of network governance policy and project
application. Explorations were accomplished by direct
observation and participation.
The first case explored in depth was the regional
comprehensive digital telecommunications plan
implemented of Emilia Romagna. The plan, the Piano
Telematico di Emilia Romagna, has laid the foundation for
online information exchange and network collaboration
between local and regional public administrations though
first the installation of a DSL cable network and then local
project experimentation. Dynamics and policies of the plan
were studied primarily through six interviews conducted
with actors at the regional level, city administrative levels
in Bologna and Reggio Emilia, and finally with regional
Internet service providers and multi-utilities. Interviews
were used to grasp the panorama of Internet policy debate
and understand evolutionary trends induced by policy
5.1 INTRODUCTION
The first chapter of this thesis presented an organizational
structure for later arguments made. The second chapter
of this thesis charted the evolutionary trend and
nexus between space and society, providing evidence
that societal changes shape urban spatial forms and
governance patterns and vice versa. The third chapter
of this thesis focused on the problems faced by urban
governance networks in light of changes and shifts in the
socio-spatial configuration of modern urban systems. The
concept of “mismatch” was introduced and discussed
to highlight the differences between functional capacity
of urban governance networks and the organization of
the spatial system in which they operate. Chapter Four
represented a passage from understanding the impacts
of society on space to understand the implications that
spatial organizations have on society constructs. It was
asserted that emerging urban regional forms require and
compel institutions to move toward a network governance
framework to establish cross-jurisdictional solutions to
the problems of metropolitan fragmentation. Strategies
suggested pointed to merging regionally coordinated but
locally articulated projects and focus on urban populations
to mitigate mismatch. The chapter then outlined the
theoretical framework for understanding the policy
processes that mitigate the mismatch between functional
and institutional urban systems through the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies to governance
coordination.
Chapter Five is a detailed study of the theoretical
assertions of Chapter Four. The chapter details specific
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 55
implications of implementation for regional network
governance organization.
Interviews cited in this case were conducted directly by the
authors of this thesis; summaries of these interviews can
be found in the appendices of this document.
5.4 EMILIA ROMAGNA: CONTEXTUAL OVERVIEW
The region of Emilia Romagna has long been revered as a
hotbed of civic participation and as having a political culture
that serves as model of good governance in Italy. To better
understand current benchmark practices in the installation
and servicing of digital telecommunications technology, it
is first important to understand the socio-political context
in which Emilia Romagna’s culture good governance
emerged. This initial socio-political survey will ultimately
to serve to then understand the best course of action and
application of similar policy models in the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies in other Italian
and global regional contexts.
Emilia Romagna is located between the Adriatic coast of
Italy and the Apennines. The region’s capital of Bologna is
located between Milan and Florence and is an important
crossroads for many of Italy’s north south railroad lines.
Bologna, apart from being a regional capital and economic
crossroads is also a university center; out of a population
of about 300,000, 100,000 are students coming from
across Italy and across the world. In terms of governance
and political culture, Emilia-Romagna was described
by Putnam in his 1993 study of Italy entitled “Making
Democracy Work” as a model of “good governance”
practice on the Italian peninsula. In terms of indicators of
regional government performance, collaborative political
culture and a sense of “civic community”, Emilia Romagna
consistently preformed at the top of his empirical indicators
(Putnam, 1993). Putnam deduced from these findings
and from historical research that the region benefited
from a historical continuity of collaborative culture that
application in regional governance networks. Interviews
were also used to understand actor perception of shifts in
dynamics in light of the institution and application of the
digital teleconnectivity plan.
The second case explored in depth was a project focusing
on the interface between governance networks and
populations. This project, entitled Where A Mi?/ Where
TO? was an experimentation with generating new forms
urban service legibility through a local pilot project
proposal. The project was developed in the context of the
UC@MITO (Urban Computing at Milan and Turin) project
of the Alta Scuola Politenica, in which the authors of this
thesis participated. Based on the research and project
work, the Where A Mi?/Where TO? Project served as local
initiative allowing for experimentation with different forms
of information communication and interfaces with local
populations. The experiences and lessons learned in the
project are detailed the second case exploration.
Each specific case will explore the organizational dynamics
around the structuring and then implementation of the
policy and project, serving as an overarching package
in which multiple arguments and discussions related
to network governance policy and project work can be
unfolded. By providing a deeper understanding of the
theoretical concepts presented in the previous chapter, it
is the aim of the authors of this thesis to condense the
specificities of network governance regional policy and
project application to a cohesive set of recommendations
to ultimately be applied in other planning contexts at the
end of this chapter.
5.3 PITER INTRODUCTION
The first case study of this chapter showcases a regional
organization and collaboration plan for the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies to enhance
governance performance. The study details the processes
by which the plan has been implemented and the specific
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS56
Communist Party however, was no more than “old wine in
new bottles” and instead reflected a modern permutation
of the collaborative political activity experience during the
medieval era (Putnam, 1993).
Innovations in governance in Emilia Romagna are not
limited to the medieval era. In the Post War era, the city of
Bologna has also served as a model in the implementation
of metropolitan governance policy to Italy and the rest
of Europe. In 1994, the city of Bologna, the province of
Bologna, and the 50 comuni comprising the province of
Bologna signed the Accordo per La Città Metropolitana.
Again deriving from a latent need from space on the
part of the city of Bologna, the “città metropolitana” was
envisioned as a twofold response to both the need to
rationalize government services and governance in the
post-tangentopoli era and dote the city with infrastructures
(expanded airport, intermodal trade hub and high speed
train) that would render it more competitive on the global
market (Jouve and Lefebvre, 1996). Such infrastructures,
needed to service the center city and stimulate economic
vitality in the wider, could not simply be allocated on
municipal soil, as such, the city was charged with “opening
itself” to the periphery and devising a new governance
system to tackle emerging socio-technological needs. The
Accordo does not impose a new level of government on
existing institutions; instead, it works within local and what
are otherwise considered “fragmented” local government
institutions to affront regional issues. The ACM is
voluntary, meaning that comuni only belong if they wish
and may withdraw when they wish, and flexible, meaning
that comuni may participate in all or only part of the
action prescribed by the ACM (Lefebvre, 2002). Activity
of the ACM administration does not substitute or override
municipal and provincial councils and serves primarily
as a “forum” orienting and shaping the ideas generated
by member and non-member cities. Collective projects
undertaken under the umbrella of the ACM thus has the
potential and power to unite and incite discussion between
multiple municipalities (Lefebvre, 2002).
started in the medieval era and has been ingrained in
political thought in regional governance practices since.
He observed specifically that regions had a “history of
‘historical collaboration’” beginning in the republican
free “comuni” of the medieval era preformed empirically
better in terms of good governance practice than their
counterparts which were ruled for centuries by more
autocratic regimes in the South (Putnam, 1993). Using
Emilia Romagna as an eventual model for future policy
recommendations, in this regard, it is first important to
study the past conditions and historical contexts that led
to the governance culture currently being practiced.
Putnam asserted that Emilia Romagna has been “blessed
with virtually one of the most successful civic cultures
in Italy” and has asserted that such a culture of good
governance and civic collaboration has socio-historical
roots (Putnam, 1993). Looking to Emilia Romagna’s past,
after the fall of the Roman Empire and upon his return
to Milan, Saint Ambrose passed through the region of
Bologna and described it as a desolate, wasteland of
“destroyed urban cadavers (semirutrum urbium cadavera)” (Sassatelli and Donati, 2006). A once thriving chain of
Roman cities and settlements hugging the Apennines
and dominating an abundantly fertile agricultural region
of the empire lay at that era in ruins. What emerged from
the ashes of post-imperial destruction would become
however, one of the densest concentrations and networks
of independent “comuni” in Europe during the medieval
era. These comuni were essentially independent city states
that developed a republican form of democratic order and
public debate. A dense and politically active network of
civic associations, trade guilds and consortia enlivened
and participated in direct political debate (Putnam, 1993).
While during the course of time the power of these
individual republics waned, a culture of collaboration
endured until the modern era. In the wake of Fascism at
the end of World War II, Emilia Romagna was at the center
of what would eventually be known as Italy’s “Red Belt”, with
the Communist Party rising to political prominence. The
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 57
Figure 5-1 ; a map of the Emilia Romagna region
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 59
In both the historical and modern examples of governance
in Emilia Romagna, what can be compared and noted is the
adaptation across time of governance institutions. Given
a specific technological or sociological phenomenon,
governance in the region and its cities has responded
with policy initiatives to regulate and promote change.
Sociological and technological change have become the
catalysts by which wider policy reforms have been adopted
and enacted.
5.5 PIANO TELEMATICO DI EMILIA ROMAGNA
Emilia Romagna is a region composed of a network of
cities engaged in ongoing network governance and policy
collaboration. The region of Emilia Romagna, in partnership
with provinces and cities within regional jurisdiction,
has developed a multi-level policy initiative for the
implementation and use of digital and telecommunications
technologies – a network plan to service the populations
and spaces of the emerging regional urban system
within its boundaries. This policy makes use of a regional
collaboration and local project initiatives in the realm of
digital telecommunications technology projects to promote
connectivity and enhance dialogues in multi-level public
administration and regional entities. The ultimate aim of
this effort is to meet the needs of populations in urban
spatial systems; working on legibility and dialogues with
the user. The region of Emilia Romagna in 2006 began
implementation of a strategic plan known as PITER (Piano
Telematico di Emilia Romagna). PITER has emerged as
a policy tool aimed at enhancing information exchange
in public administration collaboration, public health and
education.
The following sections detail for the regional then the local
specificities of the implementation of PITER.
(Portici and Policy)
Reading the space and the form of the city of Bologna, a number of conclusions can be drawn about historical governance culture that can later help to shape and understand current practices. In the case of Bologna, the cities historical urban project par excellence are its portici. The historic center of the city is connected by over 44km of portici that run along nearly all major thoroughfares and most side streets. While the portici were originally devised to maximize the use of limited space in a tightly concentrated, walled city, their existence later became a mark of civic identity and issue of civic debate. Built on private property, the portici were, as early as 1250, regulated as a public space; it was thus forbidden to impede the free flow of traffic along these corridors with commercial and productive activity (Bocchi, 1997). City “statuti”, or law code, culminated regulation in 1288 with the declaration that “all citizens living under the jurisdiction of the city of Bologna, owning and maintaining houses or workshops without portici in the city and in the suburbs of the city, in places where there are otherwise needed are required to construct portici if they are not present, each individual for their given storefront. If a portico is already existing, the space must be maintained with private funding” (Bocchi, 1997). City organizational code was enacted and carried out by individual citizens.
Figure 5-2; a photograph of Bologna’s portici
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS60
5.5.1 REGIONAL COLLABORATION AND COORDINATION
PITER has as its primary strategic planning concern
the infrastructural implementation of a regional
telecommunications “intranet” to serve as tool for project
and policy exchange between local governments and the
region.
Under the Piano Telematico di Emilia Romagna, the region
founded two specific entities: the Community Network
and Lepida SpA.
The Community Network is a forum of online information
exchange between local governments and the region.
The body is also the organizational body that implements
and strategically organizes the PITER plan in the region.
The Community Network itself is composed of actors
operating at both regional and local levels, and operates in
conjunction with digital telecommunications technologies
think tanks and service providers to create a network of
collaboration for the eventual implementation of the
project.
Technical implementation and support of this plan is being
carried out primarily by the region and the public/private
service provider created specifically by the region known
as Lepida SpA. Lepida SpA is a public/private regional
DSL service provider that has installed a DSL cable and
Wifi network accessible to local governments in the region
of Emilia Romagna. The purpose of the installation of this
cable to connect local actors under the regional umbrella
of the Community Network. While the Community Network
is the governance organizational mechanism operating
simultaneously at regional and local levels, Lepida SpA
is instead the infrastructural network that allows for
expansion of collaboration to local public administrations
through the Community Network mechanism across the
region.
The network at the moment can only be accessed by
government administrators and is being primarily used
as a coordination tool between actors at varying levels
of government. Given rapid shifts in technology, the
strategic plan is brought to the table and discussed every
three years to ultimately ensure up to date and quality
information exchange and regional services. PITER is a
physical infrastructure initiative that reflects a governance
shift to network coordination and collaboration
A number of critical activities result from regional
collaboration in the Community Network and infrastructural
implementation under Lepida SpA.
First and foremost, the network installed by Lepida
SpA is favored and used by the region as a forum for
information exchange with local governments on the
Community Network; local actors have their choice in
providing connectivity but in the end are compelled to buy
the services of Lepida to have access to the Community
Network. In this case infrastructure and connectivity is
used as a political instrument to induce and encourage
political participation and collaboration in the Community
Network, incentivizing actors to participate by providing
them with a value added service and creating multiple
spatial dimensions to public project interventions. The
aim is to create a new governance network through the
construction of an online infrastructure and network of
government and policy information exchange.
Secondly, in the experience of implementing PITER,
infrastructural projects has served as a tool to activate
and encourage collaboration on local digital and
telecommunications technologies projects, that is only
economically feasible on a regional scale (Mazzini, 2010).
PITER takes advantage of economies of scale and relative
cultural homogeneity at the regional level to distribute
telecommunications infrastructure equally across space,
linking all levels of public administration to the same
network. This strategic advantage was reflected in
conversations with the director of Lepida SpA, the regions
intranet provider, Gianlunca Mazzini, who envisioned the
construction of this infrastructure as “building the highway
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 61
before the car”, looks ahead to a need of populations
and scales of service that public administrations are only
starting to grow conscious of.
Third and finally, the installation activities of Lepida SpA are
achieved through the reuse of existing electrical and piping
infrastructure. As such, Lepida SpA as an organization
has to enter into negotiation and collaboration with local
actors to provide a regional level service. Negotiation and
collaboration activity for the installation of infrastructure
thus involves public and private sector actors working at
both the regional and local level in Emilia Romagna to
effectively and equally cover the whole region with DSL
infrastructure.
5.5.2 LOCAL INITIATIVE
Region-wide projects and interventions under PITER have
been complimented with local government initiatives. The
region-wide plan puts the impetus on local governance
networks to develop city specific plans for enhancing
Internet connectivity. What has emerged from this impetus
is a multiplicity of local initiatives and experimentations in
service provision that are then discussed and shared in the
context of the Community Network. Local experiences in
service provision and enhancement are thus transmitted
via the Community Network to localities across the region,
enhancing and diffusing good governance practices and
creating a culture of collaboration that is articulated at
both the regional and local level.
5.5.2.1 E-GOVERNANCE
Regional efforts to enhance governance connectivity
are complimented in Emilia Romagna by local efforts to
enhance service provision and dialogues with the citizen
user. As part of the Community Network, a number of
member cities have engaged in the Power 2.0 project
to experiment with and enhance governance network
interface with user populations. These shared experiences
in experimentation with more collaborative platforms with
citizenry were implemented in individual cities but across
Figure 5-3 ; a map showing the expanse of Lepida SpA’s DSL cable network in Emilia Romagna
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS62
the region and targeted different user populations, but
ultimately were captured in the regional Power 2.0 project.
“In a world where the Internet is growing ever less virtual and ever more real, what is emerging is an Internet of objects. The web moves beyond computers and encircles citizens, permitting them to interact and express themselves with continuity and frequency. Sensors of every kind, cellphones and Smartphones, gather such information and share such information on online networks” (Power 2.0, 2010).
Public connectivity has become a major policy concern
and the object of ongoing experimentation by the city
government. This commitment is complimented by a
commitment to teaching citizens how to use online
services and measuring user activity to ultimately enhance
governance services. The next part of this ongoing project
is Power 2.0. Power 2.0 uses the concept of “wiki” website
development, user generated and updated interfaces, to
enhance e-governance strategies.
With the ultimate aim of measuring and responding to the
needs of the citizen user a number of particular projects
have been developed.
In Ferrara, online platforms were used to chart perceived
architectural barriers in the city. In Piacenza, a web
portal for young artists looking to network. Modena use
an interactive web portal to allow users to rate municipal
website. Reggio Emilia implemented a portal as youth
forum. In Bologna, the Iperbole portal serves as an initial
base to then “strengthen the sense of belonging within the
Community, makes citizens aware of his / her rights and
new e-rights, foster citizens’ participation and inclusion in
the digital environment, develop a civic model of dialogue
and spread conversation, make the social capital growing
up” through user generated and updated wiki-interfaces
(Comune di Bologna, 2010). The ultimate goal is to create
an online, real time forum of public and institutional
communication, complimented by ongoing e-literacy and
educational projects.
E-governance and Web 2.0 service provision applied to
online municipal service delivery in the Power 2.0 project
is important for a number of reasons. Innovations in
dialogues with local user populations show a commitment
to the redefinition of the roles of the public administration
in service provision and dialogues with the citizenry. As
was discussed during interviews with public administration
officials, Internet and digital telecommunications
technologies allow for a streamlining of services (Guidi,
2010). Bureaucratic processes that often required the time
of public administration officials to compile paperwork
have now been refined to simple online procedures.
Such streamlining is balanced conversely by a capacity to
explore and open up new forums of information provision
and focusing on policy implementation. Administrative
officials have traveled beyond the region to discuss city
policy debate; going to the European level to share and
discuss policy. Public administrations can focus on needs
beyond bureaucratic procedure, and can be concerned
with the urban populations rather than just focusing on
the control of urban spaces.
Each initiative targets working on the application o
the social web of information for the enhancement of
government service provision. The aim is to make use of
existing cultures of communication and incorporate these
online cultures of communication into dialogues between
the public administration and users.
Finally, the initiatives under the Power 2.0 project represent
a first experimentation with targeting the needs of user
populations and not just citizens. Rather than focusing
specifically on citizens of the city, administrations have
moved to target user populations from specific cities
but also present and making use of urban space. Moves
have been made to expand civic voice to larger pools of
participants with the ultimate aim of enhancing service
provision of the public administration.
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 63
5.5.2.2 WIFI PROVISION
Policy experimentations in the provision of free Wifi in public
spaces were one of the most notably discussed by officials
in local public administrations and consequently a primary
forum of experimentation present in Emilia Romagna.
Public Wifi projects were viewed as an opportunity to
expand connectivity to populations who do not have ready
access to a computer to mitigate the problems of digital
divide in service provision.
In the case of the city of Bologna, the city has undergone
the implementation of the Iperbole program. Iperbole,
Bologna’s online service network, began in 1995 Iperbole
and was created to facilitate communication between the
local government and citizens. As part of Iperbole, each
citizen of the city of Bologna was assigned an email address
and log in information that would allow for access to a series
of online services. This initial structure was complimented
in 2005 with the implementation of a series of wireless
hotspots in main civic social spaces. Piazza Maggiore
and via Zamboni are the specific areas of interest in this
wireless project, and accessibility to the network is granted
to both citizens and students and university professors at
the University of Bologna. University students, professors
and citizens all have free access to this wireless network.
The network itself is not provided by the city, but rather
the local multi-utility, Hera. This local multiutility provides
wireless connectivity for free in main public spaces in the
city center, but does not cover the whole historic center of
the city of Bologna. Instead, the city has negotiated with
HERA to provide a wireless connectivity kit at a minimal
cost to local businesses choosing to participate in install
the infrastructure. What results is that, small businesses,
choosing to install a WIFI hotspot, install the same WIFI
hotspot as is provided in main public, freely accessible
to all citizens. What results is a “macchia di leopardo” of
service provision, with the city of Bologna providing in main
public spaces, while small businesses, looking to attract
and retain clientele, install wireless on their premises.
The macchia di leopardo approach, pictured above,
implements a similar policy strategy to that of the statuti
that governed the construction of the portici hundreds of
years before in the city, with local businesses and private
landowners enacted city mandated and coordinated policy
and urban projects.
The city of Reggio Emilia similarly has installed a wireless
network that covers the entire historical center of the city
and accessible to both citizens and visitors for free. Like the
city of Bologna, free Wifi service provision is accomplished
through a consortium of a local creditor, CREDEM, the
city of Reggio Emilia and finally a private Internet service
provider, Guglielmo. Guglielmo is an Internet service
provider that operates hotel and citywide wireless Internet
hotspots in Reggio Emilia, but also in cities across Emilia
Romagna and the Veneto. Such a diffused provision of
Internet services has allowed for a relative distribution of
costs between a wider network of clients and thus a relative
achievement of economies of scale. Such services also
extend to the realm of regulation where Guglielmo has
also set up a federation of local organizations operating
in Reggio Emilia that can authenticate visitors to provide
wireless infrastructure in the city.
The city of Reggio Emilia has thus differentiated itself from
the city of Bologna and instead moved toward a “complete
coverage” approach, pictured schematically above. This
approach guarantees uniform hotspot access in key public
places identified by and contracted to a regional service
provider. Whereas the approach in Bologna guarantees
that the infrastructure will follow the activity and service
demand, the approach of Reggio Emilia guarantees
complete coverage.
Such servicing is important for a number of reasons. The
first of these reasons is because the installation activated
through public private partnerships between regional
service providers and local city administrations. Service
provision is accomplished through networking. The resulting
collaborative activities are critical because on one hand the
cities role on one hand has shifted from that of a primary
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS64
service provider to that of a guide and mediator for a public
project vision between private citizens and small businesses
and the private internet service providers. On the other
hand, private actors such as small businesses are induced
by the results of such mediating activities to internalize
a small cost of a much wider urban project and install
individual hotspots serviced by a city-wide network. While
the city cannot simply cover the historic center of Bologna
with its own funding and network, it can provide a guiding
and organizing vision by which there is a coordination of
individual entrepreneurial activity for the ultimate provision
of a great public good. Nonpublic administration officials
are thus charged with the implementation of urban spatial
projects; having an immediate impact on the use of public
space in their surrounding city. In the case of Bologna,
new networks of collaboration and consortia with local
Internet service providers have been struck to ultimately
implement a public private policy of service provision.
The public administration, as suggested by Leida Guidi,
is not responsible, nor should it be for hardware provision
of wireless. As was the case in the historic construction
of Bologna’s portici, it is instead the role of the public
administration to operate as a negotiating voice for quality
services on behalf of the citizenry. Again, there is an
attention to service for populations, not just places, with
the public administration redefining its role as a mediator
in a network, rather than a provider or delegator of tasks.
Secondly, such negotiation between public administrations
and local service providers at a regional level leads to
a domino effect whereby the same wireless coverage
by the same service provider is offered in a number of
cities across the region. Once identified by this service
and authenticated as a user, individuals can travel to
different cities in the same region and still have access
to free Internet. Such a freedom of connectivity creates
a new scale of activity and a new conception of what is
the “city” on the part of the individual user. While in past
epochs such conception and perceptions of what is “the
city” were limited to one square and one Duomo in one
city, the possibilities of network connectivity also open up
Figure 5-4 ; a a schematic representation of the macchia di leopardo approach to wireless service provision implemented in Bologna and a schematic representation of the complete coverage approach to wireless service provision implemented in Reggio Emilia
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 65
possibilities for the network use of cities.
5.5.2.3 REGULATION
Apart from but going in hand with the provision of
wireless, online security and authentication of usership
remains a discussion of intense collective debate and
collaborative problem solving. Regional and local actors
in Emilia Romagna discussed at great length the common
institutional constraints imposed by the national “Legge
Pisanu” that requires the traceability of usership on by
Internet service providers. This law, which was written in
response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, has
constrained public administrations looking to make strides
in the realm of e-service and wireless service provision to
promote and innovate new forms of information sharing.
As such, city service providers must also provide a system
of secure log-ins to anyone wishing to connect to the
Internet in a public place. The Legge Pisanu a constraint
to entire network, creating a collective project to provide
for most efficient service organization.
At the local level, a number of public administrations
have responded to this constraint by constructing
regulation federations of major urban institutions to
service populations using wireless in the city. Public
administrations are compelled to consider users that
go beyond the definition of citizen to provide complete
service.
In terms of regulation of digital telecommunications
technologies infrastructure and servicing, the city of
Reggio Emilia provides the clearest example of shifts in
dialogues amongst local actors. It should be noted that,
in the case of regulation, there are specific national legal
constraints that place organization and operation costs
on local actors looking to provide Internet services. In the
case of the city of Reggio Emilia users are covered either
by the city, the University of Reggio Emilia and Modena
or the Congress Center located in Reggio Emilia, with
coordination of authentication activities focusing more
on service provision rather than the specific geographic
boundaries of intervention. The authentication server
provided by Guglielmo, being that it is diffused wherever
their services are, allow for users from Reggio Emilia
to travel to cities such as Parma and Piacenza where
Guglielmo is also present and freely surf the internet as if
they were in Reggio Emilia.
In Bologna, citizens are covered by registration under
the pre-existing Iperbole system. University students
and professors, almost a third of the cities population,
are instead covered by authentication to the university.
In ongoing conversations about brainstorming services
urban populations, Leda Guidi noted that one of the crucial
populations missing from this equation was nomadic users
and visitors. The ongoing challenge for the administration
of Bologna has thus been to capture and “authenticate”
this population of online users.
Regulation is guaranteed through acting on populations
living in different spatial dimensions reflected in daily life
patterns. Paying attention to authentication involves and
requires the definition and bounding of social space rather
than geographic space. Authentication can be provided at
a provincial or regional scale, operating primarily through
social institutions rather than government boundaries.
Such a system is a defining feature of redefining actor
collaborations on urban projects and be well-defined in
order to ensure safe and strategic information sharing and
internet accessibility. There is an elimination of perceived
spatial boundaries as public administrations move to act
upon flows and social groups. Such populations imply
overlapping identities and geographic scales, put also
overlapping opportunities to provide for authentication
services. Scale of policy intervention is thus a function
of urban populations’ use of spaces and not just spatial
configurations; the public administration is thus compelled
to think in new dimensions to generate the services need to
provide for such socio-spatial adaptations to technological
realities.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS66
Figure 5-5 ; a schematic representation of the authentication approach to wireless service provision implemented in Reggio Emilia and Bologna
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 67
Roman core of the city, serves a testament to the ongoing
pertinence of place and forums of gathering to compliment
Internet service provision.
While in the case of Bologna connectivity spaces
concentrated activity in Piazza Maggiore and via Zamboni,
the civic heart of the city of Bologna, other cities in Emilia
Romagna moved to have a more diffused service. In the
case of Reggio Emilia, the city has installed in main public
spaces across city where Wifi connectivity is present, a
number of new benches that give clear indications that
Wifi is present in the square. The bench because a space
of microconnectivity, where users can quickly connect
to write emails or briefly research about activities in the
surrounding city. This spatial marker is diffused across the
city and becomes a visual link to online service provision.
The spatial dimension of service enhancement is crucial
While such federations exist in a non-space dimension,
legal constraints imposed by the Legge Pisanu have also
provided a new symbol around which actors can redefine
their activity in a given context and discuss strategies for
wireless implementation. The administration of the city
of Bologna in this regard, through experimentation with
WiFi systems, has become an expert in the dynamics
of circumventing such constraints. Strategies to ensure
authentication are regularly discussed and shared among
actors in public administrations across the region, opening
up new channels of collaboration and debate.
5.5.2.4 CONNECTIVITY SPACE
As the public administration is moving to an e-governance
dimension, it has recognized the need to have a legible
interface with users. There has thus been a commitment
to a public spatial dimension of information exchange.
In Bologna, iconic civic spaces become also main spaces
for online connectivity and main centers of information
exchange between the public administration and urban
populations. Piazza Maggiore and Via Zamboni, the
social cores of the city, are consequently the prime areas
of public provided wireless connectivity. The Bologna
administration has thus worked within the confines of
public space to redefine these paradigms to the norms of
e-governance, whilst enhancing service provision through
the implementation of wireless hotspots.
While working on the diffusion of wireless services, the
Sala Borsa, the city library and a historically important civic
structure was transformed into the cities new urban center.
The Sala Borsa now serves as a spatial manifestation
of Bologna’s ongoing project in the realm of Internet
service implementation to user populations; it is a space
of layered social meaning that serves as a WiFi hotspot,
the civic library, a forum for civic organization and even
has a number of commercial services. The building itself,
which sits directly above the ruins that mark the historical Figure 5-6 ; Bologna’s Sala Borsa Urban Center
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS68
The most recent, entitled Wireless Cities, was an exposé
of the unifying concept of PITER “teniamoci in contatto”
(let’s stay in touch), highlighting the need to ongoing
policy communication and sharing. Under PITER in this
regard, an important goal was for local and regional actors
to exchange information and ideas in software innovation
and hardware configuration strategies.
The strength of such ongoing dialogues should be
noted. Relatively frequent conferences keep actors
communicating. The region in the context of the biannual
in this regard because it asserts and superimposes an
e-public space on existing public space. This visible forum
of service provision, linked to the larger regional project of
PITER serves also a symbol of good governance, garnering
recognition and solidarity for ongoing project work.
5.5.3 ACTOR EXCHANGE
The final organizational aspect of the PITER project are
annual conferences in digital telecommunications policy.
Figure 5-7
a photograph of a wireless hotspot bench in Reggio Emilia
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 69
with the regional director of PITER, Sandra Lotti. The region
is in between entity, serving as a buffer of information
exchange between local public administrations and
technology providers (Lotti, 2010). Focus is on collaboration
and consensus building through the enhancement of
regional dialogues based on this role of super connector
in an ever-densifying network of policy actors. City
governments under PITER similarly are encouraged to
develop and discuss local plans for increasing connectivity
through efforts such as the provision of free wireless
hotspots, social programs aimed at decreasing the digital
divide through internet alphabetization and providing
local portals of e-governance information exchange
between local governments and citizens. PITER there is
no particular space or scale of implementation. Being a
policy that is articulated at both regional and local levels
by a network of urban regional actors is an institutional
and spatial in between.
The aim of collaborative policy interventions is to break
scalar constraints and enhance the efficacy of the public
administration through the coverage and the servicing
populations of users and networks of users extending
beyond traditional conceptions of boundaries under
the same policy umbrella at whatever scale such action
is ultimately manifested. As was discussed in the above
chapter, digital telecommunications infrastructure is an
open source infrastructure that has an indirect impact on
urban regional systems by acting on populations that do
not necessarily conform to specific geographic boundary.
The urban spatial fix for governance come through an
implementation of services and a morphing to suit the
needs of individuals, a macro change reflected in various
aspects of policy initiatives acting within populations
and at an in between scale that always has an indirect
influence on space. The plan thus serves as an object for
a redefinition of actor networks, but it ultimately rooted in
urban spaces because of its interface with populations.
An object of collective effort, it is also a tool to enhance
communication; becoming a policy multiplier for urban
regional governance networks. The plan represents a
conferences, takes on the role of catalyst, organizer of
event and talks. This effort serves to build a culture of
collaboration and information sharing to promote the
adoption of technologies. In promoting the adoption of
these technologies, regional actors remain in contact,
exchange ideas and collaborate on projects in the realm
of wireless Internet service provision. During the recent
“Wireless Cities Conference”, presentations were broken
down into three categories: national policy framework, the
role of public administration in promoting new wireless
applications, and finally local, regional and European
experiences and models. These presentations keep
relevant actors informed about ongoing developments
and trends in ICT and digital telecommunications policy
at the regional, national and European level.
The conferences supported by PITER serve to activate
networking possibilities between relevant actors in regional
and local. The density of ongoing project activity suggests
that such information sharing has been fruitful and is
essential to the success of the PITER project – a network
of professional information exchange between actors in
relevant public and private service sectors.
5.6 PITER CASE CONCLUSION
What has emerged thus far from PITER is a collaborative
governance network that envisions and takes into account
the infrastructural problems and evolutions of socio-spatial
configurations related to the implications and applications
of Internet connectivity projects in urban regions.
PITER is a project with a regional vision that coordinates
the implementation of specific policy initiatives by
encouraging local interventions aimed at enhancing the
public administrations presence and interface with user
populations. The region works within prescribed spatial
jurisdictions to redefine cultures of collaboration and
coordination from that of hierarchy to governance network.
This attitude was reflected during the course of interviews
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS70
it similarly works within and builds upon the geographic
and social diversity of the Emilia Romagna region
through local interventions but regional coordination.
The policy serves to reframe the scale and scope of
urban intervention, envisioning the Emilia Romagna
region as a network city of socio-spatial organization and
productivity. Internet connectivity has thus complimented
transportation connectivity, mirroring other experiments
in regional coordination such as the Raandstad. In such
agglomerations, competitiveness is derived from regional
diversity and specialization of services, but enhanced
and complimented by such connectivity. Now, as Emilia
Romagna moves from infrastructural investments in the
spatial realm of transport, to the virtual realm of Internet
connectivity, PITER presents an opportunity to undo the
constraints imposed by antiquated institutional systems of
government by redefining and encouraging collaborative
policy interventions at a regional level. Islands of urban
governance with largely localized planning agendas and
project initiatives are now evolving into to dense interpersonal
and multi-scalar urban networks connected through
infrastructure that extends beyond local boundaries and
diminishes hierarchy in actor collaboration and information
exchange. Individual city governments, recognizing both
limitations to effective project interventions at the local
level and opportunities deriving from collaboration and
participation in a larger urban network effectively solve
problems of internet connectivity. Through engaging in
such collaborative dialogues however, new governance
cultures, governance network connections and new scales
of project intervention are opened up. The project thus
becomes a means by which actors solve a problem that of
wireless connectivity, and in doing so learn to collaborate
more effectively.
5.7 UC@MITO CASE INTRODUCTION
The second case exploration showcases highlights
strategies to develop dialogues with and between user
populations. The ultimate aim of the case will be to showcase
coordinated effort to target an urban regional system,
moving beyond e-governance initiatives taken on already
by individual city governments. What has emerged
from the experience of Emilia Romagna in this regard
is an example of the evolution of governance processes
through the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies.
Network building requires phasing that is accomplished
under PITER first by the collective construction of the
Community Network then by collective experimentation
PITER is innovative because it demonstrates specifically
how urban regional governance networks in Emilia Romagna
have moved proactively to respond to urban regional
needs with an urban regional telecommunications plan,
moving to update the existing governance configuration
to a network structure through the implementation of
digital telecommunications technologies and an online
e-governance interface. Internet connectivity is a policy that
has an indirect impact on urbanized areas but represents
a large intervention that no one city can “go at alone”.
Instead, the experience of Emilia Romagna underlines the
fact that there needs to be a specific delegation of tasks
between local and regional governments to tackle complex
and expensive planning issues like Internet connectivity,
but that such delegation will ultimately lead to a network
of information exchange that breaks down the rigidity of
governance hierarchy. The region uses its specific technical
and political capacity to coordinate with local actors but is
similarly able to provide a global vision of the intended
goals of the project. Since the region becomes a point of
reference in a galaxy of local governance networks, it can
evade the problem of fragmentation of local governance
not by extraditing and imposing projects, but instead by
suggesting and mediating between public and private
actors at the local level with a wider scale strategic vision in
mind. As trust is built through ongoing collaboration, local
actors similarly learn to work together in the achievement
of providing a public good through project intervention..
The success of Emilia Romagna’s PITER policy is that
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 71
Chamber of Commerce, it was never implemented due to
organizational and time constraints.
5.8.1 URBAN COMPUTING
UC@MITO was a project aimed at problem setting and
applying urban computing to the cities of Milan and Turin.
In understanding and learning about the organizational
dynamics and organizational systems involved in urban
computing projects, it was clear that such a strategy of
information exchange is also pertinent to understanding
and enhancing the interface between governance networks
and local user populations.
Urban computing projects focus on the evolutionary form
of information generation. An urban computing system is
composed of a system of sensors that compile information
streams and sensors that respond to information flows.
The following diagram explains the specific dynamics
of urban computing studies. Sensors are objects that
perceive real time movement and changes in the urban
environment. This real time movement is calibrated as
intelligence or information that is compiled to then effect
changes in the urban environment through actuators. As
actuators respond to real time information, they also have
an impact on such flows and thus continue to have an
impact on the entire system. The cycle of urban computing
in calibrating and modeling the urban environment is thus
one of constant feedback. Such dynamic information
monitoring and modeling is crucial to the refinement of
public administration service provision as it allows for a
system of rapid feedback and response to system flows
and dynamics.
Urban computing is a mechanism that can allow for
feedback and exchange between different types of users.
This dynamic, real-time information exchange can also
be applied to enhance efficacy of network governance
strategies, plans and projects. Urban computing systems
a project for providing an interface between emerging
urban governance networks under the organization and
collaboration of a regional plan and user populations. The
project was an experiment with new forms of service and
information provision to be applied first in an event context
then on a wider urban scale.
The case is highlights experiences in learning through
practical application, generating policy suggestions
through insight based on project participation. The aim of
such an exercise on the part of the authors of this thesis
was to test and challenge research and observational work
in a project context, testing and re-evaluating research
and observations.
5.8 UC@MITO CONTEXTUAL OVERVIEW
After having studied the network governance dynamics of
the Emilia Romagna region and the emerging capacity to
activate regional governance networks to tackle regional
governance problems, observations and strategies for
configuring a service interface with the individual city
user were studied through an ongoing academic project
at the Politecnico di Milano. This project, entitled, Urban
Computing @MITO (UC@MITO) was part of the Alta Scuola
Politecnica double degree program at the Politecnico di
Milano. The project served as a forum of experimentation
for how such urban computing projects can be applied in
varying contexts to activate regional governance networks
and challenge them to collaborate through the use of the
Internet and through the implementation of a project in
the realm of digital telecommunications technologies to
enhance dialogues with user populations. Lessons learned
will be presented and serve as the basis for later policy
recommendations in network governance contexts.
The project itself lasted for two years and culminated in
generation of a concept and the presentation of a pilot
project proposal to the Turin Chamber of Commerce.
While the project was ultimately accepted by the Turin
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS72
INTELLIGENCE
MODELS OF
THE CITY
SE
NS
OR
S
AC
TU
AT
OR
S
study for the UC@MITO project. Of the two cities, Turin
was ultimately chosen for pilot project application and
experimentation; concepts were however developed for
both cities. Concept presentation to the Turin Chamber
of Commerce provided an opportunity to study the city’s
policy and planning context for the implementation of
digital telecommunications technologies in e-governance
and public connectivity initiatives. During this phase,
a number of critical issues with regards to Turin policy
initiatives were noted. Examples serve to highlight and
understand the policy contexts in which such connectivity
projects operate.
First and foremost, the regional strategic plan for Turin
calls for Turin to become an important “high tech” pole in
Italy (citation). While regional strategic policy calls for the
creation of this pole, no local project initiatives have been
implemented to showcase this high tech evolution and aim
of the public administration. Such an initiative needs to be
coupled with a qualitative increase and update of urban
services to foster the growth of such a high tech pole.
applied to governance networks to ultimately provide
a spatial and project face to new network governance
organizations while at the same time measuring the
changes and impacts that policy decisions have on the
flow of people and information through urban spaces.
Governance networks in urban regional systems taking
advantage of such systems enter into such dialogues
and information exchange through the provision of online
services to ultimately engage citizens and enhance service
quality.
Urban computing allows governance networks to harness
collective intelligence of populations regarding urban
spaces and services to enhance service provision; molding
the face of governance networks to the needs of the
individual user.
5.8.2 MILAN AND TURIN
Milan and Turin were chosen as the urban regions to
Figure 5-8 ; a schematic representation of the dynamics of urban computing adapted from the original KickOff Presntation of the UC@MITO project.
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 73
were also seen as an opportunity to take advantage of
large infrastructural investment opportunities to ultimately
implement a possible pilot project. Taking advantage of
the creative energy associated with ongoing events and
the upcoming EXPO 2015 and Torino 2011, Where A Mi?/
Where To? proposes to incrementally modify urban public
spaces and open up new forums of information exchange
to city users.
In brainstorming and proposing a pilot project to the
case of Turin, it was noted that mismatches and missing
linkages in scales and scopes of coordination, ultimately
hindering the implementation of such project work and
interfaces with local populations. While scalar mismatch
in implementation proved to be one weakness and
consequently opportunity of the Turin policy, the manner
in which wireless is currently being implemented is another
problem. The city at the moment is providing wireless to
citizens, taking for granted the legibility of the service to
non-citizens that make use of the hotspots. Expanding
legibility to user populations requires an upgrading of
bureaucratic procedure to encompass the needs of
populations making use of such connectivity spaces.
5.9 WHERE A MI?/ WHERE TO?
Where A MI?/ Where TO? was the project concept
developed in response to the initial problem setting call
of applying urban computing technologies in Milan and
Turin. The following is a brief presentation of the main
components of the project.
5.9.1 CONCEPT AND SYSTEM
Where A Mi?/Where TO? proposes keeping word of mouth
human, creating a spatial dimension for online information
sharing. The system itself is composed of three parts:
first, hardware system composed of free wireless hotspots
distributed across the city in important public spaces.
This gap in local project initiative is an opportunity for
experimentation with the layering of Internet connectivity
in public places in an effort to generate attention to the
city as an emerging player in digital telecommunications
infrastructure policy and provision. In the case of Turin
specifically, while a regional project and strategic vision
had been implemented, specific local articulations of this
strategic vision were not present or coordinated by a wider
plan.
While the city of Turin has taken measures to implement a
number of wireless hotspots in the city center, accessibility
is cumbersome and difficult. While hotspots do exist,
the citizenry at large has no reason to take advantage of
connectivity in public spaces. Such cumbersome efforts at
public connectivity are the result of a number of institutional
organizational problems, the largest of which is ensuring the
traceability of Internet users under the stipulations of the
Legge Pisanu. In the case of Turin, authentication operates
by antiquated logics. Users requesting authentication
must register online to have a TorinoFacile card sent to a
fixed address. Such an organization targets and services
private citizens with access to the Internet, excluding both
nomadic users for example, from WiFi usage. Like city
administrations in Emilia Romagna, administrators in Turin
are thus grappling not so much with the actual provision
of wireless, but the servicing of such infrastructure. There
is a need to create a project that would generate demand
for connectivity in public spaces to promote the use of
existing and future hotspots and challenge the city to find
new outlets for enhancing existing service provision.
Thirdly, Turin (and Milan) are both marketing themselves as
“cities of big events”; as such, both cities need to provide
for proper infrastructure to not only host and facilitate
the movement and interaction of tourists, but also to
provide for the collective good of the greater metropolitan
community and visiting users through a qualitative
increase services. Crucial to the hosting of such events is
information exchange and diffusion from urban regional
governance organizations to visitors and citizens. Events
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS74
system is a real time modifiable software platform allowing
for local and georeferenced information exchange
between user populations. Where A Mi?/Where TO’s
software components compliment both the hardware and
urban furniture installed as part of the project. While the
hardware is the backbone of the service to be provided, the
software functions to generate an added user experience
to the system, providing a forum, an e-public space, for
online information exchange between user populations.
The bounded space of the hotspot is serviced by an online
space with bounded accessibility. The software system of
Where A Mi? / Where TO? is broken down into three parts:
an authentication system, a geo-localization system and a
Livefeed.
• Authentication Component refers to the security that
allows for access to the wireless and online services.
The authentication system similarly refers to necessity
to build a user profile that serves as a vehicle for
Second, software system composed of a mobile platform
generating a user profile accessed either by laptop or
Smartphone connections. The software system is also
composed of a Livefeed, providing real time based that
streams real time information based on the user’s location.
Finally, the third element of the Where A Mi?/Where TO?
project is a spatial system composed of the creation of a
“place” for internet connectivity.
5.9.1.1 HARDWARE
At the base of the Where A Mi?/Where TO? project is
wireless internet hardware. Wireless Internet hardware in
this case is embodied in the construction of a WiFi hotspot.
Hotspots are indoor or outdoor areas of wireless service
provision and serve as defined spatial realms of Internet
connectivity. This mechanism of bounding is crucial not
just to computer engineers but also to architects and
planners because it similarly prescribes and defines an
area of spatial project interventions.
Wireless hotspots were chosen as vehicles of service
delivery in direct relation to the observations and
experiences in Emilia Romagna. Policy makers in the region
repeated at multiple meetings and during the Wireless
Cities conference that “Internet is the killer application”
(Wireless Cities, 2010). This means that, service provision
has to innovate around delivering the Internet in the most
legible way possible to end user populations. Instead of
focusing on innovating new technologies, organizational
focus and experimentation should instead focus on the
innovation and adaptive reuse on existing technologies.
Governance networks in this regard are charged with
providing the basic forum for information exchange, the
Internet, to instigate dialogues with user populations.
5.9.1.2 SOFTWARE
The second element of the Where A MI?/Where TO? Figure 5-9 ; a schematic representation of wireless hotspot hardware configuration
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 75
forum for discussion between users. Such Web 2.0 tech
will be employed to connect users and promote location
specific information exchange.
Software component organization focuses on a uniform
service platform accessibile via multiple forms of
connectivity such as PCs or Smartphone. Multimodal
universal access via multiple modes of connectivity aims
at increasing accessibility and legibility to multiple user
populations.
information sharing. The LUNA Project discussed in the
previous chapter served as a model for this component.
• Geo-localization Component refers to the
determination of spatial location. This component is used
to generate information about activity in the surrounding
neighborhood, city or event. Such a component would
ideally combine the geo-localization capacities of LUNA
with the attention to neighbor specificity as presented in
the NYC NOW website.
• Livefeed Component instead refers to a localized
Figure 5-10 ; a schematic representation of Where A Mi?/ Where TO? software system
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS76
5.9.1.3 SPACE
Where A MI? / Where TO? space provides a physical
marker and evidence of project by responding to the
needs of public connectivity with public connectivity
spaces As previously mentioned above, wireless Internet
signals bound and define a space for project intervention.
To compliment this spatial bounding with an urban project
conversely, spatial project interventions structure forums
and “places” for online connectivity. The spatial system of
the Where A Mi? / Where TO? project would take the form
through urban furniture installations. These installations
would vary in size, and would, as previously mentioned,
reflect the socio-spatial hierarchies already present in the
city.
• The first element of Where A Mi? / Where TO? space
is the cube. The cube is a form that would appear in
central spaces, main squares and stations. It would be
a large presence that would also provide information
about registration services, Internet hotspot locations
and similarly information about ongoing neighborhood
or citywide activities and large events.
• The second element of Where A Mi? / Where TO?
space is the bus stop. Structured much like a traditional
transport bus stop, Where A Mi? / Where TO? bus stop
would be a sheltered place to sit and connect to the
internet along major transportation corridors and in
secondary squares and pedestrian spaces.
• The third element of Where A Mi? / Where TO?
space is the quick stop. Thinking specifically about
internet connectivity in urban environments, what is
often important is a place to quickly access the internet
to check email, or figure out geographic location. For
quick information verification, the quick stop instead
resembles a bus stop sign or light post, geographically
marking a place of passage for on the go connectivity.
The spatial element of the Where A MI/ Where TO
system focuses on providing legible spatial symbols and
systems for to enhance connectivity for user populations.
Strategies for the implementation of such spatial systems
were observed in wireless connectivity projects in Emilia
Romagna. While in Bologna the city moved to enhance
the urban center at the Sala Borsa as a connectivity space,
the city of Reggio Emilia instead installed a series of
marked benches indicating wireless connectivity in main
public spaces. Where A MI?/Where TO? builds off this
experience with the installation of a physical spatial network
to promote use and understanding off connectivity space,
inserting connectivity space in the public realm by giving it
spatial forms that morph with scale and context. .
5.9.2 UC@MITO PROJECT DEVELOPMENT AND
STRATEGIES LESSONS
Where A MI?/ Where TO? was developed as a three
part system of services, spaces and hardware. This
complimentary package promotes a spatial forum for
online information exchange, asserting e public space
in e- public spaces with legible spatial and informational
symbols.
In terms of project experiences, a number of theoretical
and observational inquiries during the course of concept
and project generation were explored. These theoretical
and observational inquiries are listed below and provide
a more detailed analysis of the specific aspects of the
Where A MI?/Where TO? project that later will serve to
compile a list of policy recommendations to be applied in
subsequent chapters of the thesis.
5.9.2.1 E-GOVERNANCE
The strategies in e-governance in the Where A MI?/Where
TO projects focused on giving voice to multiple voices of
multiple populations that conform to prescribed spatial
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 77
Where A MI?
Epicentres in the city
ROZZANO
ASSAGOMILANOFIORI
GARIBALDI REPUBBLICA
SAN RAFFAELE
POLITECNICO
FORLANINI
PONTE LAMBROPORTA
GENOVA
SESTO FALCKPARCO NORD
LINATE
MASERATI
PARCOLAMBRO
METANOPOLI
CAVE E SCALO SEGRATE
IDROSCALO
VILLAREALE
AUTODROMO
AUTOBIANCHI
MONZA
SANTA GIULIA
CITY LIFE
PORTELLO
BICOCCA
DUOMO
FIERA RHO PERO
ALFA ROMEO
EXPO
BOVISA
SCALO FARINI
GRECO
SAN SIRO
PIAZZA D’ARMI
PORTA ROMANA
PORTODI MARE
ORTOMERCATO
SAN CRISTOFORO
Where A MI?
Epicentres in the city
ROZZANO
ASSAGOMILANOFIORI
GARIBALDI REPUBBLICA
SAN RAFFAELE
POLITECNICO
FORLANINI
PONTE LAMBROPORTA
GENOVA
SESTO FALCKPARCO NORD
LINATE
MASERATI
PARCOLAMBRO
METANOPOLI
CAVE E SCALO SEGRATE
IDROSCALO
VILLAREALE
AUTODROMO
AUTOBIANCHI
MONZA
SANTA GIULIA
CITY LIFE
PORTELLO
BICOCCA
DUOMO
FIERA RHO PERO
ALFA ROMEO
EXPO
BOVISA
SCALO FARINI
GRECO
SAN SIRO
PIAZZA D’ARMI
PORTA ROMANA
PORTODI MARE
ORTOMERCATO
SAN CRISTOFORO
Where A MI?
Epicentres in the city
ROZZANO
ASSAGOMILANOFIORI
GARIBALDI REPUBBLICA
SAN RAFFAELE
POLITECNICO
FORLANINI
PONTE LAMBROPORTA
GENOVA
SESTO FALCKPARCO NORD
LINATE
MASERATI
PARCOLAMBRO
METANOPOLI
CAVE E SCALO SEGRATE
IDROSCALO
VILLAREALE
AUTODROMO
AUTOBIANCHI
MONZA
SANTA GIULIA
CITY LIFE
PORTELLO
BICOCCA
DUOMO
FIERA RHO PERO
ALFA ROMEO
EXPO
BOVISA
SCALO FARINI
GRECO
SAN SIRO
PIAZZA D’ARMI
PORTA ROMANA
PORTODI MARE
ORTOMERCATO
SAN CRISTOFORO
Figure 5-11 ;
a map showing the
hypothetical distribution
of hotspots in the city of
Milan
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS78
Figure 5-12 ; a visual representation of a “quickstop”
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 79
Figure 5-13 ; a moodboard representation of a “quickstop”
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 81
Figure 5-15 ; a moodboard representation of a “bus stop”
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 83
Figure 5-17 ; a moodboard representation of a “cube”
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS84
quality of urban computing projects. Cultural mobilities, in
the opinion of Dourish et al, focus on designing interfaces
for more than just the young urban professional moving
beyond A-B movement and understanding. Keeping in
mind that this is a primary tool of information exchange in
such projects at the moment, design approaches should
consider and integrate the needs of distinct populations
into dialogues focused on integrating from the traditional
moving from points a – b information diffusion, to clarity
of accessibility and enhancing an understanding of
surroundings.
Strategies for implementing legible interfaces of population
information exchange focused specifically on integrated
platforms that enhance urban spaces and online multiple
access websites to be appropriated and redesigned by
user.
In terms of understanding the information to be
exchanged in the Where A MI? / Where TO system, it
was noted after user analysis that information exchanged
in such a system focuses primarily responding to the
questions “where”, “what” and “how to move between”
georeferenced information points. The ultimate aim of the
project in this regard was to build an urban computing
feedback mechanism whereby urban governance
networks could measure and observe spatial activity
to enhance service provision first in event contexts with
eventual expansion to the wider city. User modification of
georeferenced information was seen as a primary strategy
for observational exchange in service provision for the
city of Turin government. Understanding the use and
the propensity to connect to specific Wifi hotspots and a
the density of information exchange and tagged to each
neighorhood area by user populations would help the city
administration to make decisions regarding the place of
future event spaces and modifications of existing urban
spaces. Following user activity, the city administration
could also understand gaps in activity, responding with
specific policies for e-alphabetization.
realities, overlapping and amorphous given contextual
use of urban space. In understanding populations to
be serviced, two theoretical works were drawn upon,
Martinottis (1996) identification of user populations and
metropolitan populations and Balducci et al’s 2008 work,
Confini, popolazioni e politeche nel territorio milanese.
Martinotti, identified that urban populations were no
longer confined to citizens inhabiting an urban space, but
also visitors and tourists, commuters and international
business people. Each user structures, reappropriates
and lives urban spaces in a different manner. Such life
patterns and structures were touched upon specifically in
the Confini, popolazioni e politeche nel territorio milanese
study of the Milan metropolitan area. Specific population
life paths were mapped and catalogued into a series of
distinct patterns of movement throughout the territory.
These patterns were at times confined to the central city,
but more often conformed to regional movement realities.
With these theoretical frameworks in mind, brainstorming
allowed for the identification of four principle user
populations: citizens, visitors, businesses and government,
focusing first on needs determination and then on user
interaction. The Where A Mi?/Where TO? project in this
regard was focused specifically on envisioning dialogues
with and between urban populations and providing a
forum for information exchange between user populations.
Specific tables regarding these analyses can be found in
the appendices of this thesis document.
In applying provision approaches based on user
brainstorming, it was noted that successful platforms
are embodied in interfaces tailored to user needs and
preferences. In particular, it was identified as important to
balance the needs of the citizen user with the responding to
the needs of the “nomadic” urban spatial users responding
to the questions of an urban user such as “where am I?”
and “what is around me?”. The 2004 work of Dourish et al
entitled “Cultural Mobilities: Design and Agency in Urban
Computing” highlights both this difference demand and
suggests a number of policy reflections to enhance the
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 85
Comune and the Camera di Commercio, coordination of
authentication systems is guaranteed hrough the service
provider, Trampoline UP. The Where TO? project is thus
primarily a local public-private partnership for the diffusion
of WiFi. While the POLiTO would cover student, the city
instead would cover citizens. The Camera di Commericio,
with its collaborative force and clout would instead be
used to cover businesses and visitor populations during
large events. Based on identification of relevant actors,
the following schemes propose the coordination of
authentication systems in Turin and approach to WIFI
distribution in public spaces.
In applying authentication approaches experimented in
Emilia Romagna, it was noted that the city of Turin’s original
strategy for wireless provision had focused specifically on
the city administration targeting the needs of citizen user
populations. Registration and authentication activities to
these hotspots still required a civic bureaucratic process
that was only accessible and legible to citizens, rendering
Wifi inaccessible to visitor populations. Regulation
strategies instead targeting multiple authentication and
accessibility possibilities either through the university for
students, through the city for citizen users but also through
local businesses for citizens and visitors. Expanding
regulation and authentication strategies expands the
likelihood of facility of casting a wider net of connectivity,
to ultimately be monitored and applied in urban service
provision strategies.
5.9.2.4 CONNECTIVITY SPACE
In their paper entitled “Mobility Environments”, Luca
Bertolini and Martin Djist offer a conceptual framework
for urban digital and telecommunications technology
projects. Bertolini and Dijst suggest that traditional
planning methods are “traditionally more used to dealing
with zones rather than flows, with proximity rather than
accessibility” (Bertolini and Dijst, 2003). Traditional
methods of project implementation thus inadequately
respond to the “extensive webs of interaction, supported
5.9.2.2 WIFI PROVISION
Wifi and Internet provision strategies applied in the Where
A Mi?/Where TO? project also drew upon experiences
observed in Emilia Romagna.
In terms of implementation, a macchia di leopardo
approach was adopted to ensure wireless where it was
most desired by local businesses and users. Main public
spaces would be guaranteed by the city administration
(as in Bologna) under the existing Torino WIFI strategy.
Additional secondary and event spaces would be
guaranteed by local businesses through a city coordinated
wireless service provider.
In applying provision approaches experimented in Emilia
Romagna, it was noted that added value of the macchia
di leopardo approach was the opportunity for incremental
expansion of Wifi services. In terms of project phasing
and feasibility, this becomes a crucial factor for success.
The original aim of the Where A Mi?/Where TO? strategy
was to first be applied in the context of a large event
in either Milan or Turin to experiment with connectivity
and authentication platforms and wireless diffusion.
Incremental approaches and installation of Wifi hotspots
allow for incremental adjustments in distribution of choice
of hardware.
5.9.2.3 REGULATION STRATEGIES
Regulation and authentication strategies applied in
the Where A Mi?/Where TO? project also drew upon
experiences observed in Emilia Romagna. The project
served as an experimental adaptation of service provision
strategies and authentication system organization based
on this research.
Discussions with regional start up working out of Turin;
Trampoline Up, to create a universal access platform
and help build consortia with local actors involved in wifi
projects. It was determined that authentication is provided
through three main city organizations: the PoliTO, the
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS86
traditional spaces of civic gathering compliment ongoing
e-governance initiatives. This layering of social meaning
and function, in providing for a spatial forum of virtual
exchange information exchange serves as the conceptual
base for the UC@MITO project.
Two pilot project locations were chosen, one project for
Milan and one for Turin. The following is a brief description
of the locations and the reason for their selection:
For Milan, the area around Porta Genova was chosen as
a pilot project site. Based on the critieria stipulated by
Bertolini and Dijst, Porta Genova is an important place of
meeting and passage. Standing at the nexus of southwest
bound regional trains, the M2 Green Metro Line and the
29/30, 2, 9 trams. It is also a place of important social
significance that serves as the gateway to both Milan’s
Navigli district and the Zona Tortona fashion exhibition
area. The square space in front of the Porta Genova
station is a place of passage, but also hosts a number
of temporary exhibitions and gatherings, thus making it
easily adaptable to the needs of the users occupying it.
by fast transport and real time communication networks”
typical of emerging urban spaces (Bertolini and Dijst,
2003). In the opinion of Bertolini and Dijst, layered
projects in complex nodes, “places where mobility flows
interconnect – such as airports, railway stations, and also
motor service areas or urban squares and parks “ have the
potential to exponentially increase urban quality of life and
“cope with the reality of an increasingly borderless urban
system” (2003).
The mobility environments concept seeks to redefine urban
spaces as networks of flows of information and people.
These mobility environments are an essential link between
policy research and project application parts of this thesis.
As identified in the first part of the thesis there is a fast
emerging need to create new agora that integrate realms
of virtual information exchange into a physical project
to ultimately redefine actor dynamics in a metropolitan
context. As previously discussed, an example of such a
strategy of articulating mobility environments can be seen
in the case of Bologna; physical project interventions
aimed at providing a new layer of virtual meaning to
TURIN AUTHENTICATION
Figure 5-18 ; a schematic reprsentation of Where A Mi? / Where TO’s authentication federation approach
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 87
For Turin, the area around Porta Nuova was chosen as a
project site. Porta Nuova stands at the nexus of the train
network and is important gateway to destinations across
Italy and Europe. It is also is an important stop along the
9 tram line and 52, 64, 68, and 101 bus lines. Porta Nuova
is an important node in the portici system along via Roma
that provides direct access to Turin’s historic center. Piazza
Carlo Felice serves as an important resting point and park
immediately adjacent to the station.
In both cases, the cube is placed in a square directly linked
to the station and serving as an area of transition between
different parts of the city. The bus stops are located in
secondary public spaces that are still important nodes
of activity, while the quick stops are placed along main
pedestrian routes to provide connectivity on the go.
The rationale behind the decision to place a specific
structure in a specific public space is that when dealing
with WiFi, the infrastructure needs to be designed based
on the flows of people and the presence of activities,
applying the Bertolini and Dijist concept of mobility spaces
to a possible project context. This is one of the key themes
in urban computing and is also the one thing that sets this
discipline aside from other innovation processes.
Images depicting the described intervention areas and
spatial distributions of the hotspots are located on the
subsequent page.
5.10 UC@MITO CONCLUSION
The UC@MITO project was an opportunity for the
authors of this thesis to experimentally apply research
and observational work in a specific project context.
Application and participatory experimentation provided
new insight into theoretical and organizational dimensions
and issues concerning the implementations of digital
telecommunications policy and network governance
projects.
The UC@MITO project provided an opportunity for the
authors of this thesis to experiment with the application of
urban computing to enhance dialogues and voice of user
populations in city planning and understanding the use of
space. The intended result was to apply urban computing
in a policy context that would ultimately enhance dialogues
between user populations and the public administrations to
ultimately make a more responsive public administration.
UC@MITO also provided an opportunity for experimentation
with a legible interface between local populations and
urban governance as a tool in co-creating a user population
centered interface. Research and theories detailing the
configuration and movement of urban regional populations
were applied and brainstormed in a project context, with
the ultimate aim of understanding complimentary points
of information exchange and widdling to what information
provision is essential to the success of a project.
Finally, UC@MITO allowed for an experimentation with
spatial interfaces. Brainstorming the form and application
of population servicing and spatial project interface, the
authors of this thesis were able to focus on enhancing
providing services for multiple forms of connectivity
(laptop users, Blackberry users, PC users) and spatial
dimensions of connectivity. It was ultimately deduced and
affirmed that e-online service provision on the part of
local governments must be balanced with a furnishing of
and alphabetization of use of connectivity spaces that take
on a spatial form.
5.11 CASE CONCLUSIONS
The aim of these case explorations was to understand and
to experiment with different project forms in the realm
of digital teleconnectivity to compile experiences and
deductions in what works, what does not, what observations
are founded and what can be successfully reapplied
in other project scenarios. Reapplicaiton of knowledge
acquired will be presented in the final two chapters of this
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS88
maps showing the spatial situation of
the elements of the
Where A MI/ Where
TO system and their
close relation to the
existing infrastructure
network and uses of
the spacein Milan and
Turin
Figure 5-19
Figure 5-20
CHAPTER 5: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT EXPLORATION 89
thesis.
During the course of research and interviews in the region
of Emilia Romagna, a number of strategic principles were
identified.
• A multiscalar approach eliminates hierarchy; this is
because as communication and collaboration expand,
actors move to engage in network governance that is
coordinated at the regional level but articulated and
validated by local level projects.
• The Internet serves as an object of discussion and tool to
enhance dialogues between local public administrations
and regional networks. Innovative dialogues stem from
both experimentation with the application of Internet
technologies and discussions surrounding strategies for
their intervention. Enhanced dialogues redefine cultures
of collaboration, mitigating institutional and functional
system mismatch through collective problem setting
where outcomes are uncertain.
• Internet projects act upon agents, individual users
that often move beyond and within functioning systems
of geographic scale beyond local boundaries. Projects
can thus be used to change user perceptions of urban
spatial scale and public administration intervention,
which in the future can generate new dimensions of
legitimacy and identification with regional collaborative
action.
• Internet infrastructure is spaceless, but can be used
to act upon and shape movement within, space. That
being said, the Internet is an open-source infrastructure,
that unlike previous infrastructures, is shaped by the
demands of individuals. WiFi and broadband cabling are
demand driven forms that appear where a population
chooses to take advantage of the service.
The above-mentioned observations in light of interviews
and research in Emilia Romagna were then complimented
with the theoretical concept of “Mobility Environments”.
Theoretical insights lead to concept experimentation with
interface between changing governments and changing
population. The aims of the project specifically focused on
and discovered that:
• Responding to the needs of the “nomadic” urban
spatial users responding to the questions of an urban
user such as “where am I?” and “what is around me?”.
Multiple user populations require multiple dimensions of
connectivity and a provision of multiple, but overlapping
forums and dialogues of information exchange. The aim
is to provide user populations with information that is
demanded rather than information that is suggested by
the service host.
• Incremental implementation and experimentation
with project hardware installation allows for incremental
service readjustments and more specifically for a time
frame in which user populations can slowly appropriate
technologies of information exchange. Demand is grown
over time and goes hand and hand with Wifi hardware
and online connectivity platform service provision.
• E public space should be complimented by public
spatial interventions with connectivity policy should also
work on the spatial fix of online servicing with symbols
that people know and understand. Such strategies
communication a policy message by creating a spatial
symbol for a shift in service dimension. Experimenting
with socio-spatial legibility captures and provides a
structural framework for new forms of urban services,
with the ultimate aim being the creation of a spatial
dimension for online information exchange.
5.12 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
The chapter will close after the summary of the analyses
of the previous two chapters, with a brief but cohesive
series of policy recommendations based on observational
and project experience. Recommendations aim to
provide a framework to understand the successful
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS90
policy, the following are a series of recommendations to
be applied in the New York and Portland urban regional
contexts.
5.13 CONCLUSION
Chapter Five has been dedicated to observation and
exploration of existing policy and project environments in
the realm of digital telecommunications connectivity. It was
the aim of the authors to provide an indepth analysis of
the issues at hand and possible suggestions from lessons
learned in policy and project experimentation, observation
and application that can then ultimately be reapplied in
another policy context.
Providing a panorama of actor dynamics, regional
coordination a strategies, local project interface with
urban populations and application of theoretical debate
in digital teleconnectivity served to provide a series of
cohesive policy recommendations to be carried through to
the final chapters of this thesis which will instead detail the
application of such policy to mitigating institutional and
functional urban system mismatch.
implementation of network governance regional and local
plan strategies to ultimately mitigate and break mismatch
between institutional and functional urban systems. The
recommendations below will be expanded upon in the
final chapter of this thesis.
Focusing on implementing network governance strategies
urban regions, three key points need to be taken into
consideration:
• First, the combination of regional collaboration and
coordination with local project initiatives that take into
account and work within an in between scale of plan
implementation. Economies of scale at the regional level
are complimented by locally articulated project initiatives.
Regional linkages between public administrations
embodied in a governance intranet create a network
of information exchange and collaboration that helps
enhance the quality of future regional projects.
• Second, local projects need to focus specifically
on interfaces of service delivery that reflect regional
coordination, but that are tailored to local specificities.
Initiatives must have a public spatial dimension and
move beyond provision to dialogues with local and
regional user populations.
• Finally, the spatial fix of such a plan is directly related
to servicing urban populations that operate at a regional
scale. Thinking about and servicing populations,
governance can morph into a regional area of intervention.
Legibile interfaces within this context need to focus on
not just the “citizen” user but multiple user populations
and extending multiple forms of accessibility to enhance
online information exchange.
The ultimate aim of such network governance strategies is
to work within existing local spatial boundary constraints
by linking them to a wider regional connectivity project.
Servicing populations, strategies can similarly service
socio-spatial dimensions that move beyond local
boundaries and breaking mismatches in service provision.
Based on these specific scopes of network governance
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS94
6.2 POLICY SUGGESTIONS
Based on research conclusions and project experimentation,
a number of policy suggestions have been formulated. The
final part of this thesis proposes applying lessons learned
from Italian policy and project experiences in cross-
jurisdictional collaboration through the implementation
of digital telecommunications infrastructure and urban
projects to United States and North American contexts. The
following sections detail the specificities of metropolitan
planning and governance and digital telecommunications
policy in the United States context and will take the New
York Metropolitan Region and the Portland Metropolitan
Regions as examples as a potential object of digital
telecommunications project interventions.
Before entering into specific policy details and suggestions
for United States metropolitan planners, this section will
detail why is it that Italian experiences in cross-jurisdictional
collaboration can serve as examples for eventual project
interventions in an American context by presenting first
United States experiences with metropolitan planning and
then presenting United States experiences with digital
connectivity policy.
6.3 THE UNITED STATES AND METROPOLITAN
PLANNING EXPERIENCES
This thesis has been a reflection on the fragmentation of
regional planning initiatives and governance. The United
States as an object of study has been assessed specifically
because of a number of institutional specificities that
6.1 INTRODUCTION
The first part of this thesis was dedicated to a theoretical
survey of ongoing trends in the socio-spatial evolution
of urban systems. Main conclusions pointed to a scalar
mismatch between the functional and the institutional city.
Digital telecommunications infrastructure and projects were
identified as a possible tool for intervention. The second part
of this thesis experimented with theoretical observations.
The project intervention detailed a concept and project
that articulated regional digital telecommunications
policy interventions in a specific local context. The project
similarly provided an example of experimenting with an
interface between network governance organizations and
user populations. The final part of this thesis is dedicated
to recapitulating lessons learned during research and
project application. This summary will be used to compile
a list of policy recommendations detailing how to intervene
in foreign contexts. Initial work and observations from Italy
with lead to suggestions for eventual policy and project
application in an American context. The New York City
Metropolitan Area and the Portland Metropolitan Area will
be used to evince these policy suggestions in a specific
context.
Chapter Six will focus specifically on detailing and outlining
the policy context of the United States and explaining
why and how metropolitan planning policies and policies
in the realm of digital telecommunications have failed in
the past. Discussions will then move to outlining how such
policies can be implemented in the future to ultimately
solve problems of cross-jurisdictional collaboration and
mismatch between functional and institutional spaces.
CHAPTER 6: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES: UNITED STATES CONTEXT OVERVIEW 95
existing legal and geographic constraints. While such
federal systems induce institutional competition, strong
localist and regionalist identities require policy adaption
to local and regional geographic specificities and social
realities (Malloney, 2007).
A number of regional planning and collaboration
instruments have already been implemented, the most
important of which is embodied in the federally mandated
Metropolitan Planning Organization. Metropolitan Planning
Organizations “were originally organized to respond
to federal mandates and to capture federal funding
opportunities” for urban regional projects in United States
metropolitan areas (Goldman, 2000). In the 1950s and
1960s, the main area of intervention of Metropolitan
Planning Organizations, which consequently remains their
enduring principle area of intervention, was the coordination
of regional transportation (Goldman, 2000). Under the
Federal Highway Act of 1962, “institutitional realignments…
led to MPO’s having decision-making responsibility for
transportation in metropolitan regions” (Goldman, 2000).
MPOs were also strengthened through the Clean Air Act
of 1977, which allowed for the implementation of federal
mandates in regional environmental policy. The power
of MPOs to this day is largely determined by federal
funding and local acceptance of federal interventions, with
power held by local constituent governments in regional
assemblies. Composed of a council of local governments
and stakeholders in metropolitan planning, Metropolitan
Planning Organizations are largely tailored to suit the
needs of local contexts. Portland, Oregon, internationally
recognized as having a progressive metropolitan
planning network, was able to institutionally tweak the
federal apparatus to suit contexts. The city has used its
Metropolitan Planning Organization as a tool to spearhead
regional transportation and environmental preservation
efforts.
While Metropolitan Planning Organizations serve as an
example of institutionalized regional cooperation and
collaboration, there exist a number of other examples of
lead to a problematic image and implementation of
urban regional and metropolitan planning. Fragmented
contexts in the United States stem from a lack of guiding
regional vision in planning and a socio-cultural mistrust
of centralized power. It was the opinion of the researchers
of this thesis that new strategies focusing on regional
collaboration and local articulation of local projects,
focusing on mitigating mistrust through focusing on local
user populations, would be a beneficial policy tool.
This thesis has been a reflection on the fragmentation of
regional planning initiatives and governance. The United
States as an object of study has been assessed specifically
because of a number of institutional specificities that
lead to a problematic image and implementation of
urban regional and metropolitan planning. Fragmented
contexts in the United States stem from a lack of guiding
regional vision in planning and a socio-cultural mistrust
of centralized power. It was the opinion of the researchers
of this thesis that new strategies focusing on regional
collaboration and local articulation of local projects,
focusing on mitigating mistrust through focusing on local
user populations, would be a beneficial policy tool.
The United States was also chosen as an object of
specific policy recommendation because it represented an
opportunity to apply lessons learned in Italy to one of the
authors’ home context.
6.3.1 PAST AND PRESENT
As noted by Brenner, the United States is a notable
context of intra-metropolitan jurisdictional fragmentation
(2002). In both the United States and Italy multiple layers
of governments and governance networks compete for
institutional recognition, power and funding, with vestiges
of competing levels of government and constant vying for
power and policy jurisdiction. What emerges from such a
complex system of superimposing scales of governance
initiatives is the need to collaborate and work within
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS96
United States urban systems with populations above
100,000. Though federally mandated, given institutional
limitations, the organization and efficacy of these bodies
is largely based on local context and acceptance of federal
mandate.
6.3.2 FAILURES AND OPPORTUNITIES
While regional planning initiatives vary greatly in an
American context, a common thread and organizational
issue for metropolitan governance networks and policy
collaboration initiatives are the “highly dynamic economic
clusters” at the fringe that have, through localist policy
and legal tools, zoned themselves out of responsibility
to larger regional entities (Brenner, 2002). If palatable
regional policy and coordination is proposed, such fringe
economic clusters could serve as invaluable resources to
such initiatives through collaborative activities that focus
on the entire region at stake.
The failures of United States Metropolitan Planning
Organizations very much echo the observations of a need
for identification with such institutions by individual citizens
as discussed by Lefebvre. While federally imposed projects
were adopted in some contexts, in many United States
metropolitan contexts they were instead viewed as a policy
imposition and thus largely dismantled through funding
limitations. As noted by Goldman and Deakin, Metropolitan
Planning Organizations have an “incomplete mandate
because power tied only to infrastructural investments and
not land use” (2000). The inability to garner legitimacy
and have a spatially tied project object has led to a situation
where Metropolitan Planning Organizations have a passive
organizational role in regional contexts.
Past experiences speak to failures, but given the regional
scale of intervention and organization, provide new
opportunities for application. Metropolitan Planning
Organizations represent institutional apparatus that can
be tapped for future policy initiatives dealing specifically
regional policy coordination in the American context. A
number of regions like Minneapolis having taken steps
to foster regional governance and collaboration through
regional tax sharing (Brenner, 2003). Such strategies
“eliminate wasteful competition, spread the costs of
economic growth and public infrastructure investment
throughout a metropolitan region and counteract the
effects of concentrated urban poverty” (Brenner, 2003).
Public-private partnerships and strategic plans are another
example of such strategies. Cities like Dayton, Houston,
Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and New York have all
moved to adopt such regional development strategies that
seek to organize actors at varying levels of government
and often across state boundaries (Brenner, 2003).
As suggested by Brenner, however, the United States has
a “legacy of extreme jurisdictional fragmentation within
major city regions” (2002). This is to say that, although
institutional systems of regional collaboration exist,
their relative weakness has lead to a seeming vacuum
of regional policy collaboration. Metropolitan Planning
Organizations in some instances were largely dismantled
or had their powers stricken by State authorities. Such
dismantling was accomplished largely through the lack of
provision of “matching funds…needed to obtain federal
project” making “acceptance of state-sponsored projects
a condition of funding for locally desired ones” (Goldman,
2000).
Those who have largely dismantled the Metropolitan
Planning Organization as a functional apparatus of policy
intervention, have done so because,
they tend to view ‘top-down’ approaches to metropolitan governance with skepticism and generally shy away from proposals to create new regional institutions favoring instead more flexible, decentralized approach to problem-solving which promotes ‘cooperation, coordination and collaboration (Brenner, 2002).
Metropolitan Planning Organizations are present in all
CHAPTER 6: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES: UNITED STATES CONTEXT OVERVIEW 97
also need to be coupled with local project articulations
to support and give depth to policy by focusing on an
interface with user populations. Given the expansion and
growth of United States Metropolitan areas, Metropolitan
Planning Organizations now do fit and service an urban
regional population. The project in this regard becomes
the boundary object to induce further shifts and garner
recognition for this reconfiguration.
6.4 THE UNITED STATES AND URBAN DIGITAL
TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY
6.4.1 CURRENT SITUATION
While the Internet was first invented and distributed in
the United States, the country now notably lags behind
Asian and European countries in terms of adoption rate,
e-governance projects and infrastructural investment in
urbanized regions. (Regional Plan Association, 2010).
There is, more than ever, a need for progressive digital
telecommunications policy on a regional level as research
suggests that digital telecommunications technologies still
has not received recognition as a regional policy priority.
In terms of regional policy coordination in the realm of
digital telecommunications technologies, the observations
first proposed in by Marvin and Graham from 1996 can
rearticulated today: there is a lacking of consideration
of this infrastructural tool with regional policy and place
specific interventions (Graham and Marvin, 1996).
Digital telecommunications has growing attention from
the United States federal government; funding for
state and regional projects will interest and attention,
specifically since it implies an infrastructural investment
that will continue to shape metropolitan areas and promote
economic competitiveness in the next century. Such
interest is embodied in the federal initiatives spearheaded
by the Obama administration to pass the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act aimed at combating deep
economic recession in 2009. The American Recovery
with the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies. While the weakness of Metropolitan
Planning Organizations lies in their incomplete mandate,
such a policy apparatus forces Metropolitan Planning
Organizations to “pursue partnerships…to be viable
under the mandates imposed by the Federal government
(Goldman and Deakin, 2000). Metropolitan Planning
Organizations are required to apply expertise in local and
regional projects through collaborative efforts”, much like
Italian provinces, in using existing boundaries that contain
a relatively continuous urbanized area to promote projects
and network coordination that benefit such a scale of
organization. Fiscal constraints compel Metropolitan
Planning Organizations to take new leadership roles and
consult with local governments in a regional context to
garner consensus and support local urban projects.
Coupled with new federal policy to promote Internet
connectivity, Metropolitan Planning Organizations can
serve as a tool for the coordination of federal funding and
policy efforts in the realm of digital telecommunications
at the regional level. Such regional scale entities and
jurisdictions cover a bounded space that captures and
comprises regional actors in a strategic project context.
Implementing digital telecommunications technologies
and an intranet system similar to that of Emilia Romagna
serves as a tool to link government organizations
participating in Metropolitan Planning Organizations and
thus shift the culture of collaboration. Metropolitan Planning
Organizations, become the mediator and institutor for a
communications network for constituent governments and
agencies, creating a collaborative governance network that
extends across the entire metropolitan area. Serving as a
forum for idea and project generation in the metropolitan
area that takes into consideration regional scale of project
interventions, Metropolitan Planning Organizations can
enhance consultative and collaborative roles in regional
governance debate through the implementation of such
infrastructures. Metropolitan Planning Organizations are a
channel of federal funding to support local information
exchange at a regional level; such efforts, however,
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS98
rate. The ultimate aim was to provide Internet at a low cost
for those who could not afford it living in the city. In the end,
however, Wireless Philadelphia failed because Earthlink,
the Internet service provider, reneged on its 10 year plan
with the city, selling the project to Network Acquistion, a
company that ultimately moved to provide wireless for free
and eliminating the need for the reduced rate under the
old plan. Wireless Philadelphia is now operating to provide
“digital inclusion packages” to low-income families in the
city, specifically targeting service to these populations with
specific microprojects.
The case of Wireless Philadelphia was cited in interviews
with officials involved in providing public connectivity in
Emilia Romagna, who largely believed it was a case to learn
from in terms of providing free wireless to citizens. From
a policy perspective, the failures of Wireless Philadelphia,
which were extrapolated and applied in Emilia Romagna
can be extrapolated and applied to other cases in the
United States, are linked to three primary reasons:
• Scale: a city cannot go it alone to just provide within
its own boundaries. There is a need for a regional
economies of scale in service provision to mitigate costs.
• Network: it is essential to understand and create a
network before implementing the project. Horizontal
collaboration of engaged populations allows for a
survey to better understand all relevant actors in service
provision. While the city or region cannot go it alone,
city administrations, mirroring the regional policy, moved
to serve as mediators between relevant actors involved
in service provision. Philadelphia instead focused
specifically on providing specific populations without
understanding ongoing provision activity and the specific
role of the city in provision.
• Population: understanding the intended target
population of the policy is crucial. Internet connectivity in
Philadelphia was targeted only at low-income populations,
and Reinvestment Act provides allots over $800 billion
to stimulate the American economy, with $7.2 billion
being dedicated to broadband expansion projects
(Reuters, 2010). The remaining funding under this act
is bid for through individual state strategic plans, many
of which make mention of the need to invest in digital
telecommunications technologies.
While federal funding is currently being channeled into
digital telecommunications infrastructures at the state and
local level, a current policy vacuum in the United States
serves as a space of institutional and legal experimentation.
Thinly defined norms and understandings of the
implications of digital telecommunications policy means
that norms can be set rather than abated in a regional
planning context. It is the goal of this thesis to learn
from policy and project experiences in the Italian context
to ultimately apply such understanding to metropolitan
governance and policy initiatives in the United States.
Drawing from Italian cases, and specifically the successes
of PITER in Emilia Romagna, such policies can be tweaked
and applied to an American context. In order to better
understand such policy adaptation could occur, however,
it is first, important to provide a brief survey of regional
planning and coordination apparatus in the United States.
6.4.2 FAILURE OF DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS
CONNECTIVITY POLICY
As mentioned in the previous section, at the moment
there is a vacuum in the determination of network
governance policies through the implementation of
digital telecommunications technologies in United States
metropolitan areas. Such a vacuum is also apparent in
specific efforts to foster and promote Internet connectivity
in urban populations for the purpose of government service
provision. Wireless Philadelphia, is exemplary of the policy
mismatches seen. Wireless Philadelphia negotiated with
Earthlink, an Internet service provider, to install a series of
Wifi hotspots across the city, to be accessed a low monthly
CHAPTER 6: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES: UNITED STATES CONTEXT OVERVIEW 99
service provision in an urban region failure based on
fragmentation of metropolitan governance contexts nor
the dialogues between local actors.
Chapter Six ultimately served to detail the mismatch of
scale of policy intervention in United States metropolitan
planning context and a mismatch of scope or dimension
of policy interventions. The concepts of both of these
mismatches will be unpacked in the following chapter in
detailed case studies, with the ultimate aim of the chapter
being the application of strategies presented at the end of
Chapter Five.
some of which do not have computers or the means
to access such a service. Specifically targeting at one
population limited the depth of the policy and the scope
in which user populations could make use of the product
and ultimately ensure the viability and pertinence of the
projec.t
What can ultimately be taken away from the failure of
Wireless Philadelphia and applied to other United States
contexts is the need to build a network to understand
actors involved and the scope of intervention before
passing to a specific city and regional project aimed at
Internet services. Creating the social architecture and
actor network context around a project is crucial before
passing to its implementation.
6.5 CONCLUSION AND FORWARD
Chapter Six has served to outline the socio-political
specificities of metropolitan regional planning and digital
teleconnectivity project initatives in a United States
context. The chapter specifically outlined a number of
points that will later be tested and serve as a grounds for
policy recommendations in two United States cities in the
final chapter of this thesis.
Chapter Six detailed that:
• the failure of Metropolitan Planning Organizations
due to mismatch between functional and institutional
urban systems. Metropolitan Planning Organizations
lack of recognition or identification on the part of urban
regional populations with policy initiatives as well as
weak institutional framework has served to limit its clout
in contemporary United States metropolitan planning
initiatives.
• the failure digital telecommunications policy and
projects was instead based on city centric policy
that neither captures the dynamics of poverty and
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS102
suggest strategies for opening new dialogues with users
to enhance legitimacy build upon existing regional project
work mismatch of populations
The focus this final chapter of the thesis work will be
to suggest strategies for the implementation of digital
telecommunications technologies to redefine regional
actor networks and promote network governance efficacy.
7.2 UNITED STATES STUDIES FOR POLICY
RECOMMENDATION
Two studies in metropolitan and urban regional planning
were chosen. These studies shed light into the very diverse
institutional and socio-spatial contexts of the United States,
reflecting a multiplicity of governance organizations and
policy initiatives. Study were chosen as objects of policy
recommendations and evince the multiple dimensions of
regionally coordinated by locally administered governance
project interfaces with urban populations in the realm of
digital telecommunications. The aim of this section will
be to first analyze the current policy climate of regional
collaboration and local interfaces of governance networks,
then propose policy recommendations to enhance
existing initiatives, all with the scope of moving beyond
local boundaries to envision the metropolitan area as one
continuous urban system.
New York City and the New York Metropolitan Area were
chosen as the first object of policy recommendations. New
York is the largest city in terms of population in the United
States. This huge scale also speaks to an incredibly diverse
7.1 INTRODUCTION
The first part of this thesis was dedicated to a theoretical
survey of ongoing trends in the socio-spatial evolution
of urban systems. Main conclusions pointed to a scalar
mismatch between the functional and the institutional cit
and resulting fragmentation of urban regional planning
systems. Digital telecommunications infrastructure
and projects were identified as a possible tool for
intervention. The second part of this thesis experimented
with theoretical observations. The project intervention
detailed a concept and project that articulated regional
digital telecommunications policy interventions in a
specific local context. The project similarly provided an
example of experimenting with an interface between
network governance organizations and user populations.
The final part of this thesis is dedicated to recapitulating
lessons learned during research and project application.
This summary will be used to compile a list of policy
recommendations detailing how to intervene in foreign
contexts. Initial work and observations from Italy with lead
to suggestions for eventual policy and project application
in an American context. The New York City Metropolitan
Area and the Portland Metropolitan Area will be used to
evince these policy suggestions in a specific context.
Chapter Seven will be presented as a compilation of
suggestions for eventual policy and project application in
an American context. The New York City Metropolitan Area
and the Portland Metropolitan Area will be used to evince
these policy suggestions in a specific context. The, New
York case will highlight the regional organization mismatch
of spaces and politics. The Portland case will instead
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 103
but divided institutional context. Incredibly complex
network of citizen and public administrative organizations
respond to the socio-spatial complexities and specificities
of the city, but also have overlapping and conflicting
interests that complicate policy debate. New York was thus
chosen as an archetype of a fragmented urban regional
planning context for policy recommendation.
The second city serving as an object of policy
recommendations is Portland, Oregon. The Portland
Metro area is a smaller but progressive urban region
that was able to harness and effectively wield regional
governance strategies embodied in its Metropolitan
Planning Organization. Portland often stands at the
forefront of United States transportation planning and
civic participation in urban planning initiatives. That being
said, online dialogues and planning initiatives aimed at
sparking citizen engagement still need to be developed
and articulated by local projects to give local form and
voice to metropolitan coordination and policy.
Governance strategies and recommendations in
the implementation of digital telecommunications
technologies will be applied to both to show the versatility
of the strategies suggested, and the multiple dimensions
for intervention to induce shifts in regional actor network
dynamics.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS104
7.3 NEW YORK CITY REGION
The New York City Metropolitan Area is the largest urban
agglomeration in the United States of America. With New
York City at its epicenter, the New York City Metropolitan
region spans 140 miles and comprises: three states, 17
counties, 20 cities and hundreds of towns, villages and
local jurisdictions. The region comprises over 19 million
people and is also the largest agglomeration in terms of
population concentration in the United States. The New
York City Metropolitan Area is also a key series of nodes
along the Boston to Washington D.C (Bo-Wash) northeast
corridor. This region was dubbed a “megalopolis” by Lewis
Mumford in 1939 and is an immense region comprising the
United States’ main business, financial and government
activities.
At the heart of the New York Metropolitan Area is New
York City. New York City is a hub of global finance and
trade. A “global city” par excellence, the city is also a hub
of international travel and a center of communication,
fashion and design and industrial production; it is a
command center at the forefront of technical and financial
innovation that continues to attract fortune seekers from
across the world and the burgeoning center of the United
States’ north eastern megalopolis. New York City is also
one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities on
the planet; it is the largest Anglophone city in the world
but is a place where over 170 languages from across the
planet are spoken in its streets. New York City is situated in
the State of New York, the third most populous state in the
United States, with a population of 19.4 million. The city is
divided into five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queen,
the Bronx and Staten Island.
This thesis will consider the entire New York Metropolitan
Region as an object of policy recommendations; the
aim is to break and work beyond traditional planning
interventions that consider the entirety and gravity of the
five boroughs without focusing on what is fast becoming
Figure 7-1 ; a photograph of New York City posted on Flicker.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS106
a economically dynamic, socio-spatially diversified and
global urban region.
7.3.1 NEW YORK METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE
Like other urbanized metropolitan areas, the New York
City Region has a Metropolitan Planning Organization.
The Metropolitan Planning Organization of New York is
primarily responsible for the coordination of transportation
policy coordination and is called the New York Metropolitan
Transportation Council. The council is the channel of
federal transportation funding to the New York Metropolitan
Region and is primarily responsible for the proposition and
coordination of regional strategic transportation planning.
The New York Metropolitan Transit Councils project
interventions are limited to jurisdictions within the state
of New York.
Although the New York Metropolitan Transportation
Council exists to channel federal funding for transportation
projects, the main instrument of strategic regional planning
and project collaboration in New York City is instead the
Regional Plan Association. The Regional Plan Association is
collaborative strategic force that tackles issues of economic
development, infrastructural investment and natural
resource preservation. The Regional Plan Association
has proposed and renewed three major regional planning
policy documents that appeared in 1922, 1968, 1996. The
most recent document, entitled “ A Region at Risk”,
warned that new global trends had fundamentally altered New York’s national and global position. The plan called for building a seamless 21st century mass transit system, creating a three-million acre Greensward network of protected natural resource systems, maintaining half the region’s employment in urban centers, and assisting minority and immigrant communities to fully participate in the economic mainstream (Regional Plan Association, 2010).
Figure 7-2 ; an image depicting the location of the New York Metropolitan Area in four different states
Figure 7-3 ; an image depicting the location of the New York Metropolitan Area in the context of the counties of the state of New York
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 107
FIgure 7-4 ; an image depicting the New York Metropolitan Area and urbanized areas
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS108
Unlike the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council,
the Regional Plan Association has jurisdiction that extends
across three state boundaries and encompasses over 20
individual cities. Sub-regional committees are divided
along state boundaries, but are ultimately subject to and
under the jurisdiction of the Regional Assembly. The
Regional Plan is a built solely on institutional and actor
network collaboration and serves as an important source
for regional policy prescriptions.
7.3.2 NEW YORK CITY REGION AND DIGITAL
TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY
The New York Metropolitan Region boasts not one but
two regional organization entities responsible for strategic
vision development. This being said, at the moment there is
no current regional strategic vision for the implementation
of digital telecommunications infrastructure or the
collaboration of local policy and project initiatives for
the New York Metropolitan Area. Initiatives have been
spearheaded at the state and city level, but do not capture
and service the realities of regional organizational dynamics
needed to optimize policy endeavors. Looking ahead to
the future, there have been a number of innovative policy
initiatives at multiple governance levels to get New York
City online.
7.3.2.1 NEW YORK STATE BROADBAND STRATEGY
ROADMAP
At the national level, the current government of the United
States under the direction and leadership of Barack
Obama passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act aimed at combating deep economic recession in
2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
provides allots over $800 billion to stimulate the American
economy, $378 billion of which goes directly to programs
that directly impact state economy and policy and $24.6
billion of which will go directly to New York state. $7.2
billion has been allotted to encourage the implementation
of broadband technologies to undeserved areas under the
Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (New York
State Office of Technology, 2009).
In response to Federal funding opportunities, New York
State has implemented the New York State Universal
Broadband Strategy Roadmap. This state policy meets
federal requirements to provide and improve connections
to broadband in underserved areas, to provide broadband
access, education awareness and training in “community
anchors”, to provide access and better use of broadband by
public safety agencies and finally to stimulate the demand
for economic growth, broadband and job creation. As of
July of 2009, New York State is in the process of bidding
for funding. Specific initiatives proposed under this policy
have ranged from 100% broadband coverage across to New
York State to promoting telework and distance learning, the
implementation of virtual conference rooms, “digital court
hearings” and “telemedicine and telepsychiatry”(New York
State Office of Technology, 2009).
7.3.2.2 CONNECTED CITY
Both Federal and State stimulus policies directly impact
and are mirrored in New York City digital city policy.
Broadband Technology Opportunities Program funds
are also available to New York City. Mayor Michael
Bloomberg announced the Connected City initiative in
2009. Under this initiative, the city has worked to enhance
services in health administration, education and business
development. Some specific initiatives:
• allow for iPhone users to digitally report problems to
the existing 311 service online
• expand the Notify NYC program to include a “Silver
Alert” that warns of missing senior citizens
• implement the Primary Care Information Project to
help city doctors convert paper records to digital records
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 109
• establish the NYC Business Express website to provide
a “one stop shop for people looking to start or grow
small businesses” with information about eligibility for
44 local, state and federal grants
• establish the NYC Connected Learning program aimed
at offering low income sixth graders computers, training
and free internet access to special email accounts and
didactic websites
• facilitate the establishment of IBMs New York Business
Analytics Center in Manhattan to provide for consultancy
expertise in “developing financial and government
solutions (Bindrim, 2009).
While the Connected City initiative builds upon existing
services and promotes information stream-lining and
digitization for small businesses, the initiative also
announced the Big Apps contest. The Big Apps contest
is an awards program that will assign over $20,000 in
cash prizes to “reward the developers of the most useful,
inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable
applications for delivering information from the City of
New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users” (Big
Apps, 2010). The aim is to spark innovative strategies
for the diffusion of information through social media and
networking services, as 15 city agencies are currently
making use of some sort of online platform.
7.3.2.3 CITY DEPARTMENTS
Small steps have been taken by individual departments
to implement computing and information technologies
into daily functions. These steps have either taken the
form of uploading whole information sets from individual
departments onto integrated computer systems or using
“push” information streaming to inform citizens of ongoing
changes.
The New York Police Department, for example, has taken
measures to digitalize all archives and reported cases
to allow for quick recall in trial situations. Photo archives
of reported criminals and individual weapons have been
uploaded to help victims better identify suspects and build
case scenarios. Data is also geo-referenced to analyses
of spatial distribution of crimes and help police officers
better understand the context before entering the scene
of the crime. (Interview)
Initiatives have also been taken to provide real-time
streaming information about traffic flows and notifications
from the city government. The Metropolitan Transit
Authority, the organization responsible for all surface
transport including trains, subways and buses in the
metropolitan area, now “tweets” information about transit
delays and construction projects (Pompeo, 2009). The city
government now has two programs know as Notify NYC and
311. Notify NYC allows citizens to register online with the
city government to receive information either to personal
PCs or cell phones about public healthy announcements,
public school announcements or unscheduled changes in
parking regulation in home neighborhoods. 311 is a search
engine that directs citizens to specific services online
based again on user criteria and location (Bindrim, 2009).
All systems seek to simplify information accessibility,
but none have considered the importance of a feedback
mechanism whereby citizens can quickly interact with
governance agencies.
7.3.2.4 BROADBAND ADVISORY COMMITTEE
To promote citizen awareness about Internet usage and
celebrate the cities Internet industry and community,
New York City will host its second annual Internet Week
in June of 2010. The event will be hosted and funded in
conjunction with the International Academy of Digital Arts
and Sciences (Internet Week New York, 2010).
Finally, New York City established the Broadband Advisory
Committee in 2005. To date the committee has worked
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS110
with city communities and officials to study the possible
implementation and expansion of broadband technologies
and internet connectivity in the city. a bill that would
promote and provide funding for free Internet access
across the city. In response to Federal stimulus funds,
the committee, following the examples of Philadelphia
and San Francisco is lobbying for a city-wide free wireless
network.
7.3.3 NEW YORK CITY REGION POLICY ISSUES
As was identified in the opening descriptions of the New
York Metropolitan Region, the city and region of New York
represent a context dense with socio-spatial networks
and organizations competing and collaborating in local
and regional service provision. Such activity is at the
moment also reflected in digital telecommunications
policy and connectivity. With overlapping jurisdictions of
service provision, a multiplicity of actors enriches but also
complicates policy debate, making consensus difficult
to obtain. Such a difficulty to obtain consensus can be
seen in a lack of regional policy for the implementation of
telecommunications technologies policy and projects.
In terms of digital connectivity, New York City, the New York
City metropolitan region, New York State and the United
States fall behind global competitors in the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies and services.
In the past, lack of federal policy to deal with broadband
infrastructure has lead to a lag in adoption and development
of digital technologies in metropolitan areas. Federal policy,
up until recently, has simply neglected to in send fiscal
signals or set specific standards for local governments
to innovate and adopt digital policy initiatives or promote
Internet connectivity. In most recent Regional Plan (1996),
the document currently orienting city and regional policy,
there is a need for a strategic vision and consideration of
digital telecommunications application and e-governance
initiatives. The lack of such a strategic vision leads to a
patchwork scenario of connectivity and service provision.
In the New York City Metropolitan Area, implementation of
digital technologies has been left up to the private sector
for provision and private decision making for consumption.
Left primarily up to the private sector to implement
and install broadband Internet technologies, a lack of
affordability and availability has lead to a situation where
market viability is the first criteria to the usage of Internet
and the adoption of high-speed broadband technologies.
Low-income areas and rural areas are thus excluded from
access to such technologies. The “digital divide” of the
New York City Metropolitan Area is apparent and has
consequently become a hot topic of city policy debate.
A lack of computer and high costs of broadband were
cited as the largest inhibitions to installation at home.
Although 98% of New York City households have access
to broadband connections, only 46.4% have a broadband
line at the moment. One third of Internet users in
the city accessed the internet at a local public library,
supplementing a lack of home access with access at
work or via a cell phone. Variation in connection based
on borough is high: Manhattan is roughly 55% connected
to broadband infrastructure, while the Bronx was only
38.5% connected. Finally, only 26% of residents in
public housing have access to broadband in their homes
(Belson, 2009). Indicators thus paint a mixed picture of
Internet and broadband connectivity in New York City that
straddles closely pre-existing socio-economic divides. At
the moment connectivity is primarily left up to individual
development initiative with little to no help coming from the
State or city. Such a market for different types of spaces
to connect to the internet do provide for a diversity of
choices and spurs local development initiatives but do not
and cannot substitute for an overarching citywide policy.
Finally, privatization of Internet service provision has also
lead to a situation where connectivity is primarily obtained
in commercial spaces. Book stores, cafes and other shops
become primary spaces of connectivity, but also preclude
commercial purchase for use. Thus, although Internet is
provided for free in such spaces, access to these spaces
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 111
still require an economic transactions, effectively limiting
participation and connectivity.
Obstacles for the New York Metropolitan area are thus
embodied in both the implementation of a regional
strategic plan for the linking relevant actors and building
a government network and reaching out to and building
an interface for citizens and urban populations that lack
regular connectivity.
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 113
7.4 PORTLAND REGION
Portland is the largest city in the state of Oregon and
the 30th most populous city in the United Sate with a
population of 582,130 in 2009 (Portland State University,
2010). The city is located near the border of Oregon and
Washington State along the Columbia River and extends
from the west to the Washington County and the east to
the Clackamas County. Portland is the county seat of the
Multnomah County and was unified in 1851; the Portland
metropolitan region is the 23rd most populous in the
Unites State with the population of roughly two million
people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007). Portland is well known
for its urban planning principles with a reputation for
enacting successful regional governance strategies. The
metropolitan area appears to have many of the aspect of
the “compact city “model of urban growth and present the
capacity of local and state government to shape growing
metropolitan regions and solving many of the problems of
urban sprawl in the region (Abbott, 1997). In the case of
Portland the result is a dense downtown that is pedestrian
friendly with many public transportation options. The
combination of natural resources, young environmentally
aware citizens, and transportation and resource planning
has aggregated to the city being named “The Greenest
City in the United States (Sheppard, 2007).
7.4.1 PORTLAND GOVERNANCE
Portland is governed by City Planning Commission consists
of the mayor and four other Commissioners. Portland
had its first Planning Commission in 1918 with the role of
advising the City Council at least once a month on urban
projects. During the 1960’s and 70’s a new set of concerns
about citizen involvement was added in planning process.
Therefore planners started to work with citizen groups and
neighborhoods. Decisions were reviewed and plans were
formulated not just by the planning commissions but also
by the previous mentioned groups called the Citizens
Advisory Committee. The committee was active throughout Figure 7-5 ; a photograph of Portland, OR posted on Flickr David GN Photography
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS114
the process, from formulation till implementation of plans
and this was the beginning of advocate planning by the
planning staff (Campos, 1979).
Oregon’s state-wide system of land use planning has
been widely recognized as a national leader, and has
helped to define and secure the state’s quality of life.
The state requires that local plans be in agreement with
the 15 statewide planning goals. In addition, the regional
government, Metro, has goals and policies that apply to
Portland. This means that the City planning efforts are
informed by both state and Metro goals and policies –
they form the foundation for planning efforts.
7.4.1.1 METRO’S REGIONAL FRAMEWORK PLAN
The regional governmental agency of the Portland
metropolitan area is the only directly-elected metropolitan
planning organization in the Unites State (Abbott,
1997). Metro is a regional governmental agency that is
authorized by the state to coordinate between regional
and local comprehensive plans in adopting a regional
urban growth boundary, demanding coherency between
local comprehensive plans, statewide and regional
planning aims, coordinate and recommend regional and
metropolitan decisions such as) transportation, solid waste,
air quality, and water quality (Metro, 2010) (Abbott, Abbott,
1991). Metro’s Urban Growth Management Functional
Plan (1996) and Regional Framework Plan (1997) help
counties and cities to prepare their plan and vision for
any development (Abbott, 1991). Beside that Metro is
acting like a coordinator and mediator with local leaders
and people through the region and offering consultant
services, training and distributing funds to use in the
community planning (Metro, 2010).
Figure 7-6 ; an image depicting the location of the Portland Metropolitan Area in two different states
Figure 7-7 ; an image depicting the location of the Portland Metropolitan Area in the context
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 115
Figure 7-8 ; an image depicting the Portland Metropolitan Area and urbanized areas
PORTLAND
Urban Growth Boundary
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS116
7.4.1.2 URBAN GROWTH BOUNDARY
The other important contributions of Metro in the regional
governing is managing the urban growth boundary for
the Portland metropolitan area, using land use planning
tools to prevent sprawl and to protect agricultural lands.
Every five years, the Metro Council is required to conduct
a review of the land supply and, if necessary, expand the
boundary to meet that requirement (Metro, 2010). Besides
that, the city adopted Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) in
1979 that maintains high density development in urban
areas and protects traditional farmlands surrounding the
city from any non-agricultural development. This was
an innovative movement in the time that the dominant
use of automobile empting the city’s core and guide the
development along infrastructure , in the suburbs and
create satellite cities.
7.4.1.3 THE COMP PLAN
The Comp Plan focuses on the citywide level while other
plans such as district or neighborhood plans detail more
localized conditions and issues. These smaller area plans
put into action the Comp Plan Goals and Policies. The
graphic below illustrates these relationships (City of
Portland, Bureau of Planning, 2008). Citizens have gained
another forum through which to affect the planning of
the city with the establishment of local neighborhood
associations beginning in the1960s. There are now 95
official neighborhood associations in Portland, most of
them affiliated with one of seven local coalitions (City of
Portland, Bureau of Planning, 2008).
7.4.2 PORTLAND REGION AND DIGITAL
TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY
The other complement about Portland is the city received
the Municipal Web Portal Excellence Award in 2009
ranking in the second position after Washington DC, and
before, New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. The
survey evaluated municipal websites for their privacy,
usability, content, service, and citizen participation and
ranked the cities nationally. The City’s PortlandOnline
website (www.portlandonline.com) allows citizens to pay
utility bills and businesses to get a license and pay taxes
online (Portlandonline, 2010). PortlandMaps, its online
GIS system, allows visual access to city neighborhoods,
including demographic data; crime statistics; transit
and bike routes; permitting activity; schools and parks;
businesses; and capital projects among other features. City
of Portland bureaus and offices also use blog, comment,
survey, and polling capabilities of the City’s web content
management system to facilitate 24/7 interaction with the
public.
7.4.2.1 THE BUREAU OF TECHNOLOGY
The Bureau of Technological Services is responsible
for management, policy setting, strategic planning
and leadership in the use of computer, radio, and
telecommunications technologies, to ultimately support
the delivery of effective government services (City Of
Portland, Bureau of Technology Services, 2010). The
Bureau of Technological Services strives to eliminate
duplication of effort and expenditure, increase and ease
access to information, and standardize wherever possible
and is committed to regular, effective communication
between other city bureaus (Auditor LaVonne Griffin-
Valade, 2009). The agency similarly provides the
infrastructure, software and basic presentation and
navigation format for the city’s web presence. The Bureau
uses the PortlandOnline Content Management System to
manage all Internet web content. All public and private
callable “Web Service” functions must be coordinated with
the Bureau of Technology Services to comply with both
architecture and security standards (Auditor LaVonne
Griffin-Valade, 2009).
The Bureau of Technology Services manages and
standardizes the City’s Information Technology and
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 117
Communications. Policy interventions in this regard
include:
• The provision Information Technology strategic
planning and consulting services
• The design, implementation and management all IT
hardware and software
• The management all citywide radio, video, data
communications, microwave, wireless communications
and telephone systems and equipment owned by the
City
• The management end user ICT support services
• The management the citywide Geographic Information
System
• The provision all Internet and Intranet services to City
bureaus, offices, boards and commissions
• The provision citywide communications and electronic
consulting for system planning and procurement;
Some goals of Bureau of Technological Services is in terms
of e-government services are the development of a single
City web portal and the development of a single identity
and sign on system for both Citizens and staff.
7.4.2.2 PORTLANDONLINE - PORTLANDPLAN
The e-Government initiative is centered on a web portal
called PortlandOnline. PortlandOnline provides a single
portal to reach all existing web services provided by the
Bureaus as well as features that enhance service and
information delivery options for users and service providers.
The City of Portland established and now maintains a
repository for data, with a Bureau of Technology Services
primarily responsible for the maintenance of the corporate
data repository or hub systems, as well as the appropriate
data access tools for the City of Portland. (Auditor LaVonne
Griffin-Valade, 2009) The Revenue Bureau provides the
opportunity to pay business taxes and file for new licenses
online; the Portland Water Bureau similarly allows citizens
to pay water and sewer utility bill online. Development
Services provides citizens with the opportunity to apply
for electrical, mechanical, or plumbing permits online.
Within PortlandOnline, there is a website devoted to
the PortlandPlan, the city’s 25 year strategic plan. The
PortlandPlan website is a user-friendly presentation of
the PortlandPlan aimed at interested citizens. Various
technological resources are utilized to provide information
to citizens. The Planning Committee holds town hall
meetings in the neighborhoods, these town hall meetings
are all video recorded and the videos are available on the
website. The site also offers a poll to any interested citizen
regarding the PortlandPlan and results are published. On
the other hand, The Portland Plan is an inclusive, citywide
planning effort that will guide the growth and development
of Portland over the next 25 years. The plan will address
crucial aspects of city life – for instance, housing, jobs,
transportation, sustainability, the natural environment and
infrastructure – with a long-term and holistic perspective.
It will cover the geography of the entire city and zoom in
on particular areas and topics as needed. It will be a multi-
year process and will unify several plans and projects with
a consistent and coordinated approach.
Fulfilling state requirements to update the City’s 1980 Comprehensive Plan is another reason for this planning effort to occur now. The Portland Plan will be the Comprehensive Plan for a new generation (Comprehensive Plan Assessment, Portland plan, 2008).
PortlandPlan uses a number of web resources including
streaming video, polling, and in depth resources about
the plan. This plan addresses the change in technology
that has occurred in the last 30 years. The new plan
addresses nine action areas; Prosperity, Business Success
& Equity, Education & Skill Development, Arts, Culture
& Innovation, Sustainability & the Natural Environment,
Human Health, Food & Public Safety, Quality of Life &
Civic Engagement, Design, Planning & Public Spaces,
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS118
Neighborhoods & Housing, and Transportation, Technology & Access. The PortlandPlan addresses technology both in
terms of infrastructure as well as economic opportunity.
(PortlandPlan, 2009). Its goal is to improve individual
access to technology and information by increasing
affordability of high speed internet access because now,
high-speed internet access is not available in all Portland
neighborhoods and high-speed internet access is too
expensive for many residents.
7.4.2.3 PORTLANDMAPS
The other online service that the city of Portland together
with the Bureau of Technology Services has moved to
provide is the development of simple web interface of
city GIS data named PortlandMaps (PortlandMaps,2010).
PortlandMaps was developed to give public access to GIS
data integrated with other information from all bureaus.
Using this application, Citizens can query, analyze and
review data from all bureaus that produce GIS information
and other relevant data. PortlandMaps provides a simple
to use streamlines interface for property selection and
navigation. Some of the features include:
• Locate Property quickly and easily by address or
intersection
• Access to over 50 GIS data sources including aerial
photography
• Access assessment information for Multnomah,
Clackamas and Washington counties
• Query an area or individual property for environmental,
utility, political or other information
• Create and print detailed reports including maps
(Bureau of Technology Services, 2010)
7.4.2.4 VISIONPDX
The other online service for specifically between citizen
and the city is the VisionPDX. VisionPDX is Portland’s
Community Visioning Project Launched in 2005 by
Portland Mayor Tom Potter, VisionPDX was an extensive
public engagement process to develop a shared vision
for the community for the next 20 years and beyond The
purposes of VisionPDX were to invite community members
to plan for the future of the city. There had not been a
broad look at the current state and direction of Portland
for 15 years. also to open up government to all Portlanders,
particularly to underrepresented groups and communities.
This was the largest public engagement process Portland
has completed to date, and one of the largest in North
America over 17,000 Portlanders weighed in with their
opinions over two years. Their dreams and aspirations
became Portland 2030: a vision for the future, that
includes the values Portlanders share and direction on
the built, economic, environmental, learning and social
future for our city. (Vision into Action, 2010). VisionPDx
is thus an exemplary example of e-government that
asserts municipal deliberative democratic legitimacy and
interactive policy making with local citizenry.
Interactive policy making can be seen as a specific mode
of governance that places the increase of participation
in the policy process at the centre. A definition can be
‘the early involvement of individual citizens and organized
stakeholders in public policy making in order to explore
policy problems and develop solutions in an open and
fair process of debate that has influence on political
decision making’. Interactive policy making processes are
activated in a rather top down way by governments. Thus,
interactive policy making is specific way of conducting
policies whereby a government creates channels for early
involvement in the policy process for its citizens and
other organized stakeholders like social organizations and
enterprises. These interactive processes are not only use
for gaining public support, but also capacity of reducing
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 119
the gap between citizen and traditional administration that
link citizen’s preferences more actively and interactively
to political decisions (Huys, 2006). Such public debate
is practice that Portlanders have engaged in since 1970;
internet connectivity has now enhanced these policies.
7.4.3 PORTLAND POLICY ISSUES
Portland is in many ways a regional policy success story.
While all cities and urbanized areas with populations above
100,000 have a Metropolitan Planning Organization,
Portland in particular was able to harness its institutional
organizational capacity. Regional government was used as
an in-between institution to solve the problem of sprawl,
a problem that extends well-beyond the reaches of local
policy action, with the region moving from a task delegator
to mediator, being involved in the process of the project
than just being interested in the ultimate goal. The Urban
Growth Boundary in this regard has served as the political
tool to help provide legal and perceptive legitimacy to
metropolitan authorities. Regional institutions in this regard
are engaged not just in end results, but in collaborative
processes needed to achieve long term coordination
goals. Portland has a long and successful tradition of
shaping its future through thoughtful planning. A key to
why planning works in Portland is that it is collaborative
and public-driven. Portland people have planned and
deliberately directed the urban growth through the
time. How Portlanders have shaped their cityscape and
metroscape has to do most essentially with politics, public
values, leadership, the capacity of planning agencies and
local governments, and the quality of civic discourse. Now
as the city passes to an information age level of service
provision the, city again stands at the forefront of United
States regional policy coordination.
Praise for Portland’s progressive policy climate, however,
is balanced with some ongoing and salient organizational
issues in the realm of digital telecommunications policy
and project coordination.
The public administration online and making use of
digital telecommunications technologies needs to be
truly public. The main problem with the policy framework
of Portland as it currently stands is that, while it takes
into consideration a metropolitan vision of planning,
interfaces with individual users still need to be modified
to become truly effective. Like many public administration
web portals, the PortlandOnline is largely prescriptive.
Similar to the problems encountered by Torino WiFI, while
PortlandOnline offers basic services to streamline paper
work and registration, what is missing still is a dynamic
forum of information exchange with the citizenry. Data
can be posted by the public administration, but such an
organization still excludes the voice of individual citizens
from reporting. While experiences in VisionPDX provided a
first initial experimentation with such citizen engagement
beyond the level of basic services, these efforts ultimately
limited the democratic voice and dialogue concerning
metropolitan planning to a comparatively limited
population.
Public Internet connectivity needs to have a public spatial
dimension. At the moment the public administrations
service policy takes for granted the connectivity abilities of
the individual user. As services are updated to an online
realm, so too do efforts by the public administration need
to be adopted to provide spaces for public connectivity.
Without such a forum, the ongoing metropolitan
planning initiatives of Portland, as they increasingly
move to the online realm, will face similar dilemmas in
the representation of citizen voice as a result of digital
divide of service provision. Those who have will continue to
have a stronger voice while those who are excluded from
regular Internet connectivity will be represented less in
e-Democracy initiatives.
While New York lacks a regional collaboration and
network of coordination for the implementation of digital
telecommunications policy, Portland instead has past this
initial step in updating services to suit the needs of the
metropolitan city and urban region. Portland, however, still
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS120
needs to work on the public interface with user populations,
focusing on enhancing online fora for service provision.
7.5 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
7.5.1 NETWORK GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE
Focusing on implementing network governance strategies
in United States urban regions, three key points need to
be taken into consideration:
• First, the combination of regional collaboration and
coordination with local project initiatives that take into
account and work within an in between scale of plan
implementation. Economies of scale at the regional level
are complimented by locally articulated project initiatives.
Regional linkages between public administrations
embodied in a governance intranet create a network
of information exchange and collaboration that helps
enhance the quality of future regional projects.
• Second, local projects need to focus specifically
on interfaces of service delivery that reflect regional
coordination, but that are tailored to local specificities.
Initiatives must have a public spatial dimension and
move beyond provision to dialogues with local and
regional user populations.
• Finally, the spatial fix of such a plan is directly
related to servicing urban populations that operate
at a regional scale. Thinking about and servicing
populations, governance can morph into a regional area
of intervention.
The ultimate aim of such network governance strategies is
to work within existing local spatial boundary constraints
by linking them to a wider regional connectivity project.
Servicing populations, strategies can similarly service socio-
spatial dimensions that move beyond local boundaries.
Based on these specific scopes of network governance
policy, the following are a series of recommendations to
be applied in the New York and Portland urban regional
contexts.
REGIONAL/LOCAL PLAN
Figure 7-9 ; pg ; a figure redepicting a policy strategy architecture for the regional coordination but local articulation of network governance strategies
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 121
7.5.2 NEW YORK AND PORTLAND RECOMMENDATIONS
7.5.2.1 METROPOLITAN PLANNING ORGANIZATIONS
At the moment, in both New York and Portland, policy is
focused and tailored to the central city. Collaboration at the
wider metropolitan level does not draw upon the network
strength of a regional context of action to implement
change across the urban region. City administrations are
still working within ascribed boundaries of service provision,
as seen in the case of Wireless Philadelphia.
In order to rectify this policy mismatch, it can be noted that
Metropolitan Planning Organizations match the scale of
regional population life activity and can serve as a starting
point for the implementation of digital telecommunications
plans focusing on enhancing Internet connectivity of the
public administration and individual user populations.
As was noted, the weakness of Metropolitan Planning
Organizations, their lack of power to intervene in land
use planning generates malleability to local context that
compels them to respond to the specificity of needs of
local regional populations, functioning instead as a behind
the scenes collaborator charged with moving policy
forward. Using an infrastructural fix and regional mandate,
United States Metropolitan Planning Organizations can
implement a regional intranet to connect metropolitan
regional governments with local municipalities, building
upon the existing structure a council and forum of
discussion for these governments. Such a regional
intranet, similar to that implemented in Emilia Romagna,
can serve to connect local actors and enhance the ongoing
collaborative role of the MPO as a mediator between local
governance networks and state and federal actors.
Such a strategy, as commented by Gianluca Mazzini of
Lepida SpA is focused on “building the highway before
the car” (2010). Metropolitan Planning Organizations
can be used to build the network before the service,
giving local and regional organizations an opportunity
to be aware of ongoing project initiatives and relevant
actors engaged in digital connectivity policy and service
provision. The focus is this case is on creating a demand
for services provided targeting the need to revamp the
architectural of the local political environment to make a
project successful. Building the network, as seen in Emilia
Romagna, generates and builds the network governance
and proactive policy environment needed to foster cultures
of governance collaboration in urban regions. The policy
object of such a plan is spatially rooted in first servicing
local public administrations to ultimately enhance services
to urban regional populations.
The case of New York shows a specific lack of
governance coordination at the regional scale. The New
York Metropolitan Area is a chain of cities and urban
agglomerations stretching across northeast seaboard,
with New York City as its primary node. Regional scale
projects are still met skepticism to this primacy and
entrenched in Fordist concepts of center and periphery.
Focusing specifically on the development of the network
connectivity of the entire region primacy of New York (a
region comparable in scale to that of Emilia Romagna) will
make the city itself a central node, but expand networks of
collaboration and connectivity with the periphery.
In the case of New York, governance networks can:
• Use the regional plan in combination with Metropolitan
Planning Organizations to collaborate on a regional
digital telecommunications plan and intranet similar to
that of Emilia Romagna. This, New York Metropolitan
Region Connectivity Plan would link local administrations
across the metropolitan area. Strategic policy goals
can be directed by the Regional Plan Association, with
funding and collaborative work emanating directly from
the Metropolitan Planning Organizations.
• Implement locally based spatial projects that articulate
the plans presence and serve to modify spaces of
connectivity in the metropolitan area specifically in
critical public spaces like public libraries, parks across
the metropolitan area.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS122
• Focus on strengthening connectivity of user
populations; the failure of Philadelphia is directly linked
to targeting one user group. As in the case of Emilia
Romagna, the principal target population were nomadic
citizens and visitors making use of wireless hotspots;
such categorization helped the public administration to
apply specific strategies considering and reaching out to
major regional organizations such as universities.
• Focus on bringing interface with citizen to “peripheral”
cities to break skepticism and promote a horizontal
collaboration network. Services should ultimately be
distributed equally to all municipalities in the Metropolitan
Planning Organizations jurisdiction, with the aim being
to give voice to relevant governance networks at the local
level.
Looking ahead, the New York Metropolitan Region needs
to focus on breaking a strongly perceived socio-spatial
and governance hierarchy with public administration
networking and collaboration at the regional level. Using
the Metropolitan Planning Organization and building
upon its traditional role as collaborative and coordinative
mediator of regional policy, a regional intranet plan can
serve as a first step to providing a proactive governance
environment needed to promote Internet and digital
telecommunications connectivity policy. The first step is
to open up channels of information exchange between
relevant actors at the regional level through the installation
of such a public administration intranet, that in time serves
a common project to foster collaboration and promote
communication at the metropolitan level.
7.5.2.2 PUBLIC SPATIAL PROJECTS AND
CONNECTIVITY
Digital telecommunications technologies are becoming as
vital a tool in the governance balancing act as buildings,
transport networks and utilities systems” (PublicTechnology,
2010). Over three-quarters (77%) of respondents agreed
an improved broadband network would significantly impact
on city competitiveness. “City authorities therefore need to
consider that such technologies are as fundamental to a
city’s infrastructure as are its buildings, transport networks
and utilities,” (PublicTechnology, 2010). “It is increasingly
being treated like electricity —an essential architecture
that underpins all services and activity in the city.”
(PublicTechnology, 2010). Digital telecommunications
technologies can “no longer be considered in terms
of single infrastructure specific applications or pieces
of software” but a fundamental aspect of governance
service provision to enhance the quality of everyday life of
urban populations. Public administrations are charged to
provide the forum and tools to enhance online information
exchange and dialogues between urban populations: there
needs to be an assertion of e-public space that enhances
this dialogue.
New York City and Portland are cities of great public spaces and
public spatial projects. New York’s Central Park and museums,
Portland’s public transit system and growth boundary evince
an attentive public administration. City spaces need to be
enhanced with a new layer of socio-spatial meaning. While
both New York City and Portland city administrations moved
to update online services, such services still operate at a
limited in this capacity because there are still policy gaps
related to with how service is provided and accessed.In this
regard an attention to the interface with urban regional
populations is essential to the policies adoption and
success. Applying new layers to existing and relevant social
spaces and using socio-spatial cues comprehensible to
local and regional user populations is critical in this regard.
As city administrations move to provide online services,
there needs to be a non-economic, public e-space of
Internet connectivity as expansive as enhanced services
in public libraries, public places of connectivity accessible
to everyone or micro as a laptop rental and provision to
lower income communities to connect in such spaces
At the moment, see that the digital divide in service
provision exacerbates existing quality of life differences
in metropolitan communities; not taking for granted that
CHAPTER 7: NETWORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT STRATEGIES IN UNITED STATES CASES 123
everyone has access to internet.
The specific case of Portland provides an example of
how such services could be updated focus on quality
and revamping interface with user populations in specific
urban spatial contexts. Problems seen in response to
online planning initiative, a little more than 10 percent
of the population responded to online iniatives. Internet
accessibility enhanced their voice, but diminished that of
other user populations. The vision of the PortlandPlan is
to Increase affordability of highspeed internet access and
also Increase use of the internet for public services , but
there is no spatial dimension of project intiatives.
The concepts experimented in the Turin ConnecToMi or
in the Bologna Sala Borsa project serve as models to be
adopted in advanced and progressive public administration
contexts like Portland. Ranging from different quick stop
and bus stop connectivity environments, to squares
and neighborhood streets, e-public space needs to be
asserted in public space. The Portland city administration
can assert a realm through local spatial connectivity
projects. Such projects serve as tools of engaging user
populations, and also as symbols showing experimentation
with and constructing interface of governance networks
online. After having made strides to update the public
administration to service only exigencies, a next step
is focusing specifically on a public wireless project for
Portland is to focus on delivery and the specific interface
with user populations; how to teach and dialogue with
those who have regular access to Internet and equally
those who have irregular connectivity either because of a
lack of online alphabetization or economic limitations.
Attention specifically should be paid to:
• The implementation of connectivity spaces across the
region; an online public administration is not enough
if it cannot be accessed by user populations. Steps to
update a progressive public administration need to be
synced with steps to update a user population, making
citizens aware and able to use online services and
providing forum for such information exchange.
• Working towards online legibility and real time
dialogues; at the moment, the Portland governance web-
interface is largely prescriptive, providing bill payment
services and business registration. In this case the
public administration is still not responding to the needs
of users, but rather facilitating bureaucratic procedures
through online interface.
• Enhancing dialogues of information exchange with
the individual citizen, but also linking with other city
administrations. While focusing on responding to the
needs of urban regional populations, links between
varying levels and public administrations is still not
developed. A project focusing on building collaboration
between local public administrations in the Portland
Metro area would compliment ongoing efforts to respond
to the needs of citizens.
Looking ahead, Portland public administrations and
governance networks need to build upon existing online
initiatives by strengthening the administrations presence
in e-public spaces. Providing a open access for online
information exchange for urban populations to access in
dialogues with the public administration and for personal
use is a next step in expanding the use and efficacy of
ongoing initiatives.
7.5.2.3 POLICY BASED ON POPULATIONS
One of the greatest failures of regional projects in the
United States is a perception of irrelevance. The failure
of Metropolitan Planning Organizations is directly
related to a seeming detachment from local context
and an authoritative position taken to delegating and
implementing regional planning projects. To break
this tendency toward localism, Metropolitan Planning
Organizations and regional governance networks should
structure governance communication and initiatives based
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS124
on the user experience in urban spaces. Strides should be
taken to tailoring governance to user experience to create
a dialogue that builds upon an ultimate recognition of a
regional perception of governance initiatives. Focusing on
individual user populations there is a communication at
the local context and validation of regional collaboration
initiative, providing new recognition of regional
collaborative bodies and the long-term success of
regionally implemented project and policy initiatives.
Governments in both cases are still focusing on spaces,
rather than focusing on space through implementing
policy targeting urban populations, the spatial fix defining
urban areas. Initiatives were tailored to service the needs
of citizens of the city without taking into consideration
the complexity and diversity of populations operating in
these spaces, and how often correspond and operate in a
multiplicity of geographic scales.
Initiatives should target specifically focusing on
• Branching out to think about underrepresented and
multiple, regional user populations. In both the cases of
Philadelphia and Turin, public administrations providing
services only to citizens and specific groups of citizens,
faced limitations to generating a usership guaranteeing
the success and efficacy for the project.
• Updating and encouraging the e-alphabetization of
urban regional populations to go hand in hand with
government online initiatives. It is the job of government
to enhance legibility and find a successful way to provide
information and connectivity that goes beyond traditional
paradigms (and in doing so changing specific scopes of
intervention
Focusing on interfaces based on multiple urban regional
populations expands the scale and scope of intervention and
captures current urban socio-spatial dynamics. Opening
dialogues and providing services to such populations
also generates a feedback mechanism that enhances the
quality and multiples the scale of service provision. The aim
is to ultimately focus on the socio-spatial organizations of
populations to update the services provided by local public
administrations. Needs, in this regard, generate new scalar
responses that work beyond and around local boundaries.
7.6 CONCLUSION
The complexity of United States regional planning and
project debate speaks to an ample field of experimentation
and application of possible strategies for breaking localistic
and fragementative political environments with network
governance strategies and initiatives. This chapter has been
dedicated to providing an overview of the current trends in
metropolitan planning and e-governance adoption in United
States urban regions, drawing upon research and thesis
project experience to provide a set of recommendations
and tools to encourage horizontal and cross jurisdictional
collaboration of regional actors. This cohesive set of policy
recommendations based on research and project experience
is the closing of this thesis experience.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS128
8.2 RESEARCH CONCLUSIONS
The first section of this thesis was dedicated to establishing
a theoretical framework for urban policy and project
interventions in contemporary metropolitan areas and
urban regions.
Chapter Two of the thesis provided crucial background
information and theoretical frameworks for understanding
the socio-spatial evolution of modern urban systems. The
socio-spatial dialectic was discussed in order to show that
there is a nexus between spatial development and societal
evolution. Focusing specifically on societal evolutionary
trends, research demonstrated that epochs of capital
organization in the Fordist and Post-Fordist eras generated
specific urban socio-spatial configurations. The chapter
concluded with the identification of the Network Society as
a current paradigm to be adopted to understand the needs
of contemporary metropolises. The chapter closed with a
crucial discussion of the scalar dilemma of governance for
ongoing project interventions.
Three key points were identified in Chapter Two:
• Innovations in digital telecommunications
technologies and the advent of the Internet has created
a hyper glocalization of information exchange and a
hyper individualization of society. Individuals represent
nodes in glocal networks of information exchange and
movement.
• The Internet and digital telecommunications
infrastructure was identified as having an indirect
or secondary impact on urban systems by shaping
8.1 CONCLUDING REMARKS
This thesis has been a summary and amalgamation of
the academic and professional experiences of its authors
during the course of their career at the Politecnico di
Milano. It has been an exercise in urban planning and
policy analysis, focusing both on policy and project design.
What has emerged from the work presented in this thesis
is the conviction that there are mechanisms and strategies
that do exist and that need to be implemented in order to
cope with governance fragmentation in urban regions.
The goal of this thesis has been to unite theory and
practice to provide suggestions and strategies to build
and to enhance urban regional network governance.
Ongoing research in both the reasons for metropolitan
governance fragmentation and the impacts of digital
telecommunications technologies on socio-spatial
organization has served as a theoretical background
for project work. The Alta Scuola Politecnica project
presented during the course of the thesis was used as
a forum for experimentation with policy and project
organization, drawing upon research accomplished in
the first phases of this thesis. The final goal of such an
exercise was to be able to provide regional policy and
local project recommendations to ultimately apply in
the United States. Such recommendations will provide a
unitary and complete project vision that can guide future
initiatives at the local and regional level. It is only through
the construction of such a symbiotic dialogue between
scales that the project’s success can be assured. Human
institutions similarly reflect this evolution and constant
metamorphosis of scale and importance.
CHAPTER 8: THESIS CONCLUSION 129
Chapter Five outlined two case explorations in the
implementation of digital telecommunications. The case
study of Emilia Romagna’s Piano Telematico (PITER) was
presented to better showcase the specificities and shifts in
governance dynamics in response to the implementation
of digital telecommunications technologies primarily
through observation and interviews with actors involved.
In Chapter Five it was concluded that:
• Successful urban regional planning is built on regional
coordination efforts articulated a by local project
initiatives. Regional strategic planning needs to move
from directive to collaborative and from supramunicipal
to intramuncipal. Cross-jurisdictional problems require
cross-jurisdictional solutions and interventions to
garner the perceptive legitimacy needed to support and
continue regional collaborative efforts.
• Cross-jurisdictional collaboration must be activated
by common policy goals and interventions. Digital
telecommunications technologies and plans for their
implementation are boundary objects that allow for new
value creations and the generation of urban regional
policy goals. Such technologies serve as objects for
collective collaboration and policy experimentation and
as tools to expand horizontal and cross-jurisdictional
communication in regional governance networks.
• Given the hyperindividualization and glocalization
of society in the Internet age, urban regional public
administrations and governance networks are compelled
to activate services that respond to populations that
extend beyond the traditional geographic scale of
the cities. Boundaries are blurred as administrations
respond to populations and not just citizens; digital
telecommunications technologies in this regard can be
used as a tool to enhance communications with spatially
dispersed populations.
The second case study was instead presentation of the
issues and observations raised during the course of
movement but by being itself a shapeless infrastructure.
• Exchanges are not necessarily inscribed in specific
geographic scales and are instead embodied in flows,
presenting policy and service issues for urban governance
networks.
Chapter Three presented a more focused study of socio-
spatial evolution across capital epochs focusing specifically
on the evolution urban governments and governance
systems embodied in metropolitan planning. The chapter
identified a failure of metropolitan governments in the
wake of Fordism, largely attributed to the need to garner
popular perception of governing legitimacy and the failure
to promote intra-institutional forms of collaboration. The
chapter ended with the assertion that fragmentation of
metropolitan governance networks can be largely attributed
to the application of Fordist metropolitan planning in Post-
Fordist urban systems. As cities have grown and morphed
into urban regional systems, institutions have failed to
respond to their socio-spatial complexities. The mismatch
between the functional and institutional system has
created a system of localistic but partial solutions to the
problems of urban regional planning. Localist responses
inhibit the implementation of projects benefitting the
entire urban region.
8.3 HYPOTHESIS CONCLUSIONS
Chapter Four was the crux of the thesis and was focused
on presenting recommendations to treat the problem
of institutional fragmentation with new strategies of
regional collaboration. The chapter opened a study of the
application of digital telecommunications technologies to
urban regional governance networks. It was suggested that
such technologies expand opportunities for collaboration
and communication. The concept of boundary objects was
presented and applied to urban policy studies to explain
how such collaboration and communication is enhanced
in th specific context of a digital telecommunications plan.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS130
• Changes to actor network dynamics are limited by
the networks themselves. As was observed by Gianluca
Mazzini in Emilia Romagna, the effectiveness of policy
and project initiatives is shaped by the political climate.
Simply put, initiatives have to be in the right place at the
right time to be truly effective as a regional collaboration
and coordinative project. Limitations are imposed by
institutional organization and related directly to a need
to define just how public or private online connectivity is.
8.4 POLICY RECOMMENDATION CONCLUSIONS
Chapter Six sought to demonstrate that in the United States
there is an extreme case of metropolitan fragmentation
of urban regional collaboration and service provision. It
was also demonstrated that the institutional failure of
metropolitan planning organizations was related to the
fact that they were unable to respond to local specificity of
socio-spatial context.
Chapter Seven sought to apply lessons learned in theoretical
research, hypothesis analysis and contextual surveys in the
United States to two specific cases. The cases of New York
and Portland showed that there is a spectrum of regional
institutional collaboration that needs to be considered.
Policy recommendations were applied based on the scale
and depth of coordination and collaboration at a regional
level already present.
In Chapter Seven, it was concluded that
• City and urban regional institutions can promote
cross-jurisdictional collaboration and coordination
across local boundaries through the implementation of
regional visions, local projects; the boundary object that
makes this possible is digital telecommunications policy
and project experimentation
• Metropolitan Planning Organizations can be reinvented
to represent an institutional apparatus and scale needed
ongoing project work for the Alta Scuola Politecnica Where
A Mi? / Where TO? project. Given that such projects are a
local articulation of regional policy and strategic planning
initiatives, the successes and failures of the project phase of
this thesis must also be taken into consideration to provide
for a complete set of policy and project recommendations.
From project experimentation and application is was
concluded that:
• E-public space can be superimposed on pubic space
to assert and reinforce of the public dimensions of
both. Internet connectivity projects are infrastructural
investments that have an indirect impact on the use of
space, serving as magnets for public activity. Interventions
that create a public spatial forum for Internet connectivity
similarly assert the public dimension of online space,
becoming a tangible signal of connectivity.
• Acting on and providing for populations beyond
traditional city compels public administrations to increase
legibility of online services. The public administration in
this regard moves from a provider of information to a
facilitator of information exchange. Dialogues around and
reformulations of service provision and moves to serving
the needs of regional populations in online forums of
information exchange, changes perception of the public
administrations clout on the part of the individual user.
The regional scale of urban life systems generated from
the needs of individuals thus becomes embodied in the
new forms of e-services provided, breaking boundaries
of collaboration.
• Public administrations are compelled to shift to meet
user needs by the Internet. Populations also limit this
legibility and service provision; initiatives need to be
coupled with e-alphabetization initiatives to prepare
citizens to participate in new democratic online spaces.
A move to a the provision of online services is only
effective if citizens and populations impacted by the
policies of administrations know how navigate online
forums of information exchange.
CHAPTER 8: THESIS CONCLUSION 131
8.5 FINAL REMARKS
“Planning is not an abstract analytical concept but a
concrete socio-historical practice, which is indivisibly
part of social reality” (Albrechts, 2005). Urban form is a
paradox constant evolution and socio-spatial legacy, where
the past, present and futures of human society collide
and vie for pertinence and relevance. These overlapping
paradigms of socio-spatial organization serve as an
opportunity for planners to propose meaningful and long-
term policy and project designs, considering and linking
scales of intervention. Only then can planners redefine
and strike a new balance between the definition of the
functional city and the definition of the institutional city,
inducing the evolution of spaces and boundaries to rectify
what is otherwise a mismatch between spatial and social
constructs.
It has been the aim of this thesis to demonstrate and
prove that the concept of city goes well-beyond a defined
downtown center of business activity; the modern city is
instead a complex regional network of exchange of goods
and information, made possible in part by ever developing
innovations in transit and digital telecommunications
infrastructure. Building and planning for the modern city
has required a look into past socio-spatial organizations
to understand how better to mitigate and the balance the
needs of these legacy spaces and government designs
with the burgeoning and often conflicting socio-spatial
dynamics of the urban region and of network cities.
New infrastructure serves as a catalyst for new organizational
dynamics of governance and actor networks. This thesis
proved that, through the manipulation, the installation
and the use of digital telecommunications infrastructures,
city and regional governance networks can experiment
with new forms of information exchange, project initiative
collaboration and strategic long term visioning for regional
policy as previously undefined or unconsidered scales of
intervention. New opportunities exist to generate network
governance for urban regions.
for successful implementation of regional digital
telecommunications plan. Being the principal recipient
of Federal funding for urban regional environmental and
transportation policy, the vaguely defined policy climate
of Internet connectivity and services can coupled with
ongoing Federal funding can serve as an opportunity to
promote collaboration clout of Metropolitan Planning
Organizations. Collaborative projects in urban regions
can reaffirm the cross-jurisdictional political and
collaborative clout of such agencies to provide for
future metropolitan regional planning coordination. As
previously demonstrated much like in other cases, the
Internet has an indirect impact on the coordination and
configuration of metropolitan socio-spatial systems,
being not only a tool to enhance communication, but also
an object of common policy debate and experimentation.
• To articulate the pertinence of such a regional projects
promoted by Metropolitan Planning Organizations, at the
local level public administrations can focus on providing
a public forum for Internet provision in the context of a
wider regional project. Private public strategies applied
in Emilia Romagna match the political climate in the
United States that is often skeptical of the quality of
purely public intiatives. E-public space can similarly
serve as a magnet to attract users to underused public
spaces, a specific problem in United States urban
contexts, creating a spatial dimension for a service that
individuals want and need in the course of day to day life.
• In terms of the quality of services provided, attention
specifically should be paid to online legibility for the user.
Local administrations, in the context of a wider regional
project focusing on service provision, should strive for
an opening of dialogues with urban populations and
not just provision of public information. Online spaces
of public administrations at the moment represent
prescriptive entities that furnish information and support
basic registration services; tracking the needs of urban
metropolitan populations still lacking.
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS134
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THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS142
GIANLUCA MAZZINI
DIRECTOR OF LEPIDA SPA
13/04/2010
offer fiber optic services to local city administrations that
the market did not offer
created by a regional law; private company with a private
purpose
intended specifically for communication only between
public administrations; citizens and businesses are
secondary beneficiaries
political sharing and collaboration essential; administrations
in Emilia-Romagna particularly adept in this regard
strategy of “building the highway before the car”
region an affective forum for implementing a project:
achieve both economies of scale and homogenous enough
to build consensus
mitigate the digital divide?
Implementation was in part based on timing; the moment
politically and economically was right.
Lepida is always the operative arm; services are sometimes
delegated out to smaller consultancies, but they always
have the final say
Incremental installation of infrastructure; building around
what already exists [piping, phone lines, electrical wires] ;
small steps with a long term vision ; but also limited by this
infrastructure because it doesn’t optimize accessibility,
had to move to stitch everything together
already seeing returns; price of intitial investment mitigated
by incremental approach [didn’t have to rush into the
market]
A) INTERVIEW SUMMARIES
A fundamental part of this thesis experience has been
the ability to connect and dialogue with actors involved
in the planning and governance networks of Emilia
Romagna. These experiences provided a window into the
complexities of governance network organization, but
also into the opportunities and solutions arising from the
implementation of ICT projects.
The following are summaries of specific key points that
arose during the course of these interviews. These key
points and observations were later incorporated back into
the thesis, refining the theoretical framework and providing
guidance for eventual project design and implementation.
The following individuals were interviewed from April until
June of 2010. Interviews were conducted in person.
Gianluca Mazzini
Director of LEPIDA SpA, the Region of Emilia Romagna’s
Internet provider
Sandra Lotti
Director of PITER, the Piano Telematico di Emilia Romagna
Eros Guareschi
Director of Information System and Technological Services
of Reggio Emilia
Leda Guidi and Daniele Tarozzi
IPERBOLE, Bologna’s Information Services Office
Giovanni Guerri
Director of Guglielmo, Internet service provider operating
in Emilia Romagna
APPENDICES 143
single issue projects; “comunità tematiche” ; region
provides infrastructure and then consults, dialogues with
local governments and provides know how to local specific
application
**“in between technology developers and local
administration” don’t know how to talk to eachother;
regions job, self-appointed, to faciliate communication
procedures developed by ICT experts “not usable, not
accessible, not useful”
e-governance first step, then after actively applying to
e-education, etc.
“look outside and see it from the user point of view” with
citizens pointing out what works and what isn’t working
“people using it still scarce” “don’t know, difficult to use”
people not knowing about or how to use is the fault of
government administration “fault of governance”
Piedmont, focused on WIFI in response to national
governments initial investment in tech; reason for the
multiplicity of actors without a specific project
[name of law, year?]
looked to receive money and visibility from it’s use
and implementation
shift in government and governance; application of
resources means that man power can be shifted to where
it needs to be; more space for more creativity
Sala Borsa; space of sharing between the generation’s
importance of dialogue and spatial dimension to the
application of these new technologies as well
“keep public dimension and human experience”
FOLLOW UP:
private sector company with a public mission; success
cannot be measured by profit, but instead by opportunity
cost [accumulating what would’ve been spent with a
private service provider that is now being insead provided
by Lepida]
opportunity to move into the market checked by an
increase in risks ; monopoly on service for the regional
government would have to be given up
SANDRA LOTTI
DIRECTOR OF PITER
24/04/2010
wireless also a legal problem; post September 11th in Italy,
all users have to register EVERY time a public access point
is used; MUST be authenticated
in Italy, authentication in this case often happens through
SIM card; store of information [but for foreign visitors?]
Lepida designing models and architecture for various
forms of hotspots to be presented on JUNE 17th
clarification of our concept; localized hotpsots with Web
2.0 neighborhood exchange access points
implementation of PITER and Community Network; given
the change in technology, experience is measured and
discussed every 3 years to provide for necessary policy
adjustments
project mostly financed by the region: 80/20
Community Network started out as a memorandum of
understanding that eventually developed into a regional
policy; built consensus before putting it into political action
agree on goals standards and priorities
“cooperazione applicative”
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS144
LEDA GUIDI AND DANIELE TAROZZI
IPERBOLE
11/05/2010
Need to distinguish between provision of infrastructure
and the provision of services.
Need to distinguish what exactly is the cities role; the city
cannot, as public sector body, compete with and favor
certain private sector interests. The city, instead, acts a
negotiator and mediator on behalf of the citizenry for
the provision of specific private sector service. The city
in this provides through contracting and acts through
indirect service provision rather than direct and local
physical and social interventions [based in European laws
of competition]
Two main problems on the part of local governments :
money and authentication.
Bologna; experience began in 1995 with the foundation
of Iperbole; all citizens are given access to an internet
address. From there, service provision moved to a number
of hotspots in the downtown area to be accessed by
students and citizens already registered under the service.
Service provider is Go Net; prefer the strategy of “snowball
effect” by which the city negotiates for a predetermined
kit [that subsequently is provided at a city wide level to
all other small businesses choosing to participate]. Once
authenticated in one plac,e you have access to the whole
city wide network.
Students and citizens covered; main problem is providing
for the tourist population coming to the city [hotels;
Chamber of Commerce?]
Lepida business plan; strategies for wireless applcations
contacts
meeting on June 17th
EROS GUARESCHI
DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION SYSTEM AND
TECHNOLOGICAL SERVICES OF REGGIO EMILIA
06/05/2010
understanding the Philadelphia model and failure in
wireless provision; the city can’t do it alone and cannot be
covered completely at a given scale
focus on the nomadic citizen (cittadino nomadico); where
people are sitting is where the wireless should be
infrastructure has to be harnessed and bent to individual
citizens’ needs
free service is the best form possible; if the city makes
it an intiative to provide such a service, frustrations with
connectivity aren’t sent downstream to individual citizens;
the public administration thus needs to find a way to
facilitate online connectivity
provision made possible and funded by local creditor
(CREDEM); furnished by a local multiultility (ENIA)
strategies for public service; place wireless in a public
park flanked by social housing and an elementary school;
students teach elderly about wireless connectivity and
Internet literacy through a program coordinated by Reggio
Emilia city government and made possible through the
hotspot furnished in public spaces
federation of authentication creates a “circle of trust”
by which main local actors can validate online users and
mutually recognition previous registration; the aim is to
cover everyone within the constraints of the Legge Pisanu
APPENDICES 145
wireless service.
Technology : Smartphone vs WIFI
The quality of smartphone services and connectivity is
linked to specific peak and non peak flows of usership.
Meaning that, more people on the network causes greater
traffic and thus slower service. WIFI is not effected in
the same way by traffic fluxes. In addition, Guglielmo is
coming up with a device which would allow users to switch
back and forth between Smartphone and WIFI given the
comparative quality of service. This means that, although
services on the Smartphone may be privately accessible,
they may not be as favorable to internet usage as Wireless
infrastructure.
Smartphones are limited because:
1) performance on wifi is higher
2) prohibitively expensive
3) people coming from another country can’t have access
4) not everyone has a smart phone
Services : push
Some element needs to signal to the user what is available
in a specific area in terms of services; to simply have the
information available is not enough.
GIOVANNI GUERRI
DIRECTOR OF GUGLIELMO
03/06/2010
Point to be stressed is that Guglielmo achieves economies
of scale by providing a uniformly accessible service that is
available in multiple cities
“spalmare i costi” by distributing costs at a wider than
regional scale and by incorporating municipal as well as
private sector actors*
Guglielmo works mainly in hotel wireless provision; the
network of hotels thus permits them as a service provider
to distribute costs and provide lower costs service to
municipal governments
Authentication : Four Ways
1) paper at an office : go sign up somewhere
2) SMS : send a message
3) credit card : verified and pay online [if payment is
required]
4) federation of organizations : covered by subscription or
membership to an organization
Price :
Verona : 100 hotspots / costs the city administration
roughly 15,000 Euro a year
Reggio Emilia : historic center / 10,000 Euro a year
Funding : Banks
Interesting in attracting clientele under the age of
30; CREDEM appearing on the Reggio Emilia WIFI
advertisement thus promotes their image a bank and
organization that would be favorable to youth
[works to attract future business]
Implementation : collaboration between service providers
Guglielmo builds on the frame of existing fiberoptics
within the wider PITER project. At the moment there are
two DSL/broadband cables, one provided by Lepida for
governance purposes and the other instead is provided by
Enía, which is used as the base for Guglielmo to provide
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS148
C) CONNECTOMI PILOT PROJECT PROPOSAL
ConnecToMi @ Salone del Gusto 2010 Spazio fisico e informazioni virtuali: una piattaforma di dialogo per la città.
E. Della Valle, M. Corubolo, M. Arancio, D. Campobenedetto, S. Magliacane, S. Mirzaei, R. Musso e F. Nasturzio
Contesto Al giorno d’oggi, le città crescono, cambiano e si sviluppano molto velocemente e questo processo risulta influenzato da un grande numero di fattori, sia umani che non. L’evolversi della civiltà e della città dovrebbero andare di pari passo, ma non sempre risulta essere così. Uno dei fattori mancanti all’interno dello spazio urbano oggi è la dimensione pubblica del dialogo, costante e in tempo reale tra gli individui che lo abitano. Manca la possibilità per chi frequenta gli spazi urbani di percepire i flussi ed i cambiamenti dei sistemi urbani stessi; manca la possibilità di percepire e di interagire con lo spazio urbano nella sua interezza.
La tecnologia per costruire spazi pubblici, nei quali lo scambio d’informazione online abbia anche una dimensione spaziale, è già oggi disponibile. Il Web, come lo usiamo oggi, è un “foro” di scambio d’informazione pubblica e privata; la nuova agorà del XXI Secolo. Le reti WiFi pubbliche sono il punto di accesso a basso costo e per tutti al Web. I terminali mobili di ultima generazione sono il canale pervasivo attraverso cui erogare servizi.
L’idea innovativa che di seguito esponiamo come ConnecToMi, si propone di introdurre un nuovo strato di “significato” dello spazio pubblico offrendo servizi che facilitino l’instaurarsi di dialogo tra l’individuo e l’ambiente urbano in cui lo stesso scambio di informazione assuma una dimensione spaziale.
Canale per la commercializzazione di tali servizi sono gli eventi che le grandi città spesso si trovano ad affrontare. Il ruolo degli eventi (in particolare quelli grandi) nella trasformazione in corso è quello di stimolare e promuovere progetti innovativi, che possano diventare utili successivamente anche all’infrastruttura urbana. Le occasioni economiche legate ai grandi, medi e piccoli eventi non mancano, si pensi ai 20 miliardi di euro che verranno spesi solo per le infrastrutture dell’Expo 2015, oppure ai 200 milioni di euro legati al business del Salone del Mobile, di cui 31 milioni destinati alla preparazione di eventi cittadini.
ConnecToMi Come soluzione a questo distacco tra spazio urbano e dialogo in tempo reale proponiamo ConnecToMi. ConnecToMI è un sistema di scambio d’informazione “glocal” e in real‐time fornito gratuitamente nei centri urbani ai cittadini e ai turisti da organizzatori di eventi, negozianti e amministrazioni pubbliche.
Il sistema ConnecToMI ha, infatti, due facce. Da un lato fornisce al cittadino nell’ambito pubblico connettività online e servizi real‐time. Dall’altro lato, invece, propone l’analisi di dati statici e real‐time per amministrazioni urbane e organizzatori di grandi eventi. Mentre i cittadini e visitatori
APPENDICES 149
beneficiano di una connettività facile e gratuita tramite reti wireless nei centri urbani, gli amministrazioni e organizzatori possono usufruire dell’elaborazione di questo flusso di dati e dell’attività generata dagli hotspot. Ne consegue che, utilizzando i dati relativi ai flussi e agli scambi tra attori connessi agli hotspot Wi‐fi, gli enti di pianificazione, gli organizzatori di eventi, ma anche i singoli negozianti avranno la possibilità di modificare i loro servizi/prodotti per meglio corrispondere i bisogni del cittadino privato o del consumatore in genere.
L’idea di ConnecToMi è quella di abilitare la creazione di un nuovo fremito d’attività nell’ambito urbano per poi misurarlo e valutarlo con lo scopo sia di migliorare servizi e prodotti esistenti sia di crearne di nuovi.
Un progetto pilota al Salone del Gusto 2010 ConnecToMi propone di “aggiornare” lo spazio attorno a noi per passi: un evento alla volta. Come primo passo proponiamo un progetto pilota in contesto del Salone del Gusto 2010.
L’idea è di realizzare un sistema per la costruzione di un sistema di feedback e di dialogo tra visitatori, gli standisti e gli organizzatori dell’evento, monitorando i flussi e le interazioni collettive con l’obiettivo di arricchire gli strumenti della rete di governance dell’evento.
ConnecToMi @ Salone del Gusto 2010 Spazio fisico e informazioni virtuali: una piattaforma di dialogo per la città.
E. Della Valle, M. Corubolo, M. Arancio, D. Campobenedetto, S. Magliacane, S. Mirzaei, R. Musso e F. Nasturzio
Contesto Al giorno d’oggi, le città crescono, cambiano e si sviluppano molto velocemente e questo processo risulta influenzato da un grande numero di fattori, sia umani che non. L’evolversi della civiltà e della città dovrebbero andare di pari passo, ma non sempre risulta essere così. Uno dei fattori mancanti all’interno dello spazio urbano oggi è la dimensione pubblica del dialogo, costante e in tempo reale tra gli individui che lo abitano. Manca la possibilità per chi frequenta gli spazi urbani di percepire i flussi ed i cambiamenti dei sistemi urbani stessi; manca la possibilità di percepire e di interagire con lo spazio urbano nella sua interezza.
La tecnologia per costruire spazi pubblici, nei quali lo scambio d’informazione online abbia anche una dimensione spaziale, è già oggi disponibile. Il Web, come lo usiamo oggi, è un “foro” di scambio d’informazione pubblica e privata; la nuova agorà del XXI Secolo. Le reti WiFi pubbliche sono il punto di accesso a basso costo e per tutti al Web. I terminali mobili di ultima generazione sono il canale pervasivo attraverso cui erogare servizi.
L’idea innovativa che di seguito esponiamo come ConnecToMi, si propone di introdurre un nuovo strato di “significato” dello spazio pubblico offrendo servizi che facilitino l’instaurarsi di dialogo tra l’individuo e l’ambiente urbano in cui lo stesso scambio di informazione assuma una dimensione spaziale.
Canale per la commercializzazione di tali servizi sono gli eventi che le grandi città spesso si trovano ad affrontare. Il ruolo degli eventi (in particolare quelli grandi) nella trasformazione in corso è quello di stimolare e promuovere progetti innovativi, che possano diventare utili successivamente anche all’infrastruttura urbana. Le occasioni economiche legate ai grandi, medi e piccoli eventi non mancano, si pensi ai 20 miliardi di euro che verranno spesi solo per le infrastrutture dell’Expo 2015, oppure ai 200 milioni di euro legati al business del Salone del Mobile, di cui 31 milioni destinati alla preparazione di eventi cittadini.
ConnecToMi Come soluzione a questo distacco tra spazio urbano e dialogo in tempo reale proponiamo ConnecToMi. ConnecToMI è un sistema di scambio d’informazione “glocal” e in real‐time fornito gratuitamente nei centri urbani ai cittadini e ai turisti da organizzatori di eventi, negozianti e amministrazioni pubbliche.
Il sistema ConnecToMI ha, infatti, due facce. Da un lato fornisce al cittadino nell’ambito pubblico connettività online e servizi real‐time. Dall’altro lato, invece, propone l’analisi di dati statici e real‐time per amministrazioni urbane e organizzatori di grandi eventi. Mentre i cittadini e visitatori
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS150
Figura 1 Mappa del servizio basato su ConnecToMi per il Salone del Gusto
ConnecToMI al Salone del Gusto potrebbe offrire:
• servizi di posizionamento e tuning degli hotspot WiFi per offrire la connettività gratuita ai visitatori della fiera,
• servizi di Single Sign‐On (in conformità alla legge Pisanu) con minima barriera all’ingresso per i partecipanti all’evento (grazie alla partnership con Trampoline Up1)
• portale completamente configurabile offerto agli utenti dell’hotspot WiFi in fase di registrazione (grazie alla partnership con Trampoline Up)
• una serie di applicazioni di 2d barcodes per “etichettare” lo spazio fisico e favorire il flusso di informazione tra i visitatori, gli standisti e gli organizzatori dell’evento (grazie alla partnership con IKANGAI Solutions2)
• servizio di tracking di flussi di utenti usando WiFi (grazie alla partnership con il progetto SocioPatterns3)
• soluzioni software per abilitare il dialogo tra utenti e spazio fisico, integrazione dati esistenti e analisi dei dati (integrando in una soluzione software innovativa basata su tecnologie semantiche [5] servizi Web 2.0 esistenti come Facebook4, Twitter5 e foursquare6)
1 http://www.trampolineup.com/2 http://www.ikangai.com/3 http://www.sociopatterns.org/4 http://www.facebook.com/5 http://twitter.com/6 http://foursquare.com/
APPENDICES 151
• interpretazione e utilizzo in real time dei dati analizzati (basata su una soluzione software innovativa di reasoning in real time7 su dati stream sviluppata al Politecnico di Milano nel contesto del progetto Europeo LarKC8)
• complementi di arredo per segnalare la presenza di hotspot WiFi di ConnecToMi e per ospitarne gli utenti
Il progetto è strutturato in due parti: un’infrastruttura hardware e una soluzione software. L’implementazione dell’infrastruttura hardware consiste:
a) nell’installazione di una serie di hotspot WiFi nello spazio fieristico accessibili a qualunque utente. La soluzione WiFi “all inclusive” offerta da ConnecToMi tramite Trampoline Up garantisce meccanismi di autenticazione secondo le norme legislative del Legge Pisanu ma permette ugualmente ogni utente presente negli spazi pubblici provvisti di Wifi di accedere ai servizi proposti.
b) nell'uso intesivo di 2d barcodes forniti da IKANGAI Solutions per “etichettare” gli stand, gli eventi e ogni altro “oggetto” con cui i visitatori del Salone del Gusto possono interagire. Questi barcodes rappresentano il punto di collegamento tra lo spazio fisico e il mondo vituale.
La soluzione software di ConnecToMi permette:
a) lo scambio d’informazione locale tra vari attori che frequentano gli hotspot WiFi. b) l’accesso a diversi tipi di informazione, in tempo reale e non, provenienti da diversi servizi
Web 2.0 (Facebook, Twitter e foursquare), e da dati e servizi specifici del Salone del Gusto e degli standisti presenti
c) la registrazione e l’analisi in real time di flussi di interazioni tra utenti e spazio (grazie alla tecnologia sviluppata al Politecnico di Milano e alla partnership con SocioPatterns).
Partner Trampoline Up
Trampoline è una startup nata a Gennaio 2010 e incubata presso I3P ‐ Incubatore delle Imprese Innovative del Politecnico di Torino. Organizzata secondo il modello delle "lean startup" del Web 2.0, è stata fondata da Giampaolo Mancini, CEO, e Francesco Varano, CTO, fra i massimi esperti italiani di servizi e tecnologie per reti Wi‐Fi e HiperLAN.La direzione del settore marketing e commerciale è invece affidata a Lodovico Marenco, ex responsabile per l'e‐commerce di Alpitour e Basic.net.
IKANGAI Solutions
IIKANGAE in giapponese significa “buona idea”. IKANGAI Solutions è una startup austriaca fondata nel 2009 da Christian Scherling (architetto e designer) e da Martin Treiber (ingegnere informatico) specializzata in applicazioni per iPhone e iPod touch. In particolare, di recente ha sviluppato una linea di applicazioni basate su 2D barcode.
7 http://www.streamreasoning.com/8 http://www.larkc.eu/
THESIS: NETWORK GOVERNANCE FOR URBAN REGIONS152
SocioPatterns Il progetto SocioPatterns è portato avanti dalla Fodanzione ISI9 (Torino, Italia) e dal CNRS10 (Francia). Il progetto si propone di studiare i pattern delle dinamiche sociali e delle attività collaborative. Il progetto ha sviluppato una piattaforma software e una rete di sensori per misurare le interazioni sociali. La piattaforma permette di aggregare, analizzare e visualizzare i dati raccolti dalla rete di sensori.
Finanziamento necessario Per portare a termine con successo il progetto pilota per la Salone del Gusto stimiamo che sia necessario un finanziamento di circa € 10.000 da suddividere nel modo seguente:
‐ € 4.000 per coprire spese vive dei partner che intendiamo coinvolgere (Trampoline Up, IKANGAI Solutions e SocioPatterns),
‐ € 4.000 per ricompensare le persone che lavoreranno al progetto, e ‐ € 1.500 per coprire i costi dei materiali informatici e della connessione Internet da
utilizzare nel progetto pilota.
9 http://www.isi.it/10 http://www.cnrs.fr/
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