After the Smart City: Institutionalizing Digitization as a Governance Project in Amsterdam, Boston, and Singapore

Abstract

This dissertation examines how cities institutionalize digitization as digital systems move beyond smart city pilots and innovation programs into routine urban governance, planning, and management processes. The dissertation argues that, at this stage, digitization becomes a governance project. Inherited governance regimes and the emerging governance pressures around coordination, dependency, and legitimacy shape how cities reorganize who sets direction, who supports implementation, who brokers collaboration, and where oversight sits. Through process tracing based on field observations, interviews, and documentary analysis, the dissertation analyzes Amsterdam, Boston, and Singapore as contrastive forerunner settings. The cases are not treated as representative smart cities or as examples of one universal sequence. Rather, the comparison shows how similar governance pressures are filtered through different institutional contexts. Amsterdam, often associated with networked smart city experimentation, moves toward more explicit rights-led municipal governance through political ownership and internal innovation capacity. Boston moves from civic experimentation brokered by a special unit toward enterprise coordination led by the city’s central technology department. Singapore reorganizes long-standing state-led digital capacity through combining central steering, shared digital platforms, and distributed agency-level implementation. The dissertation finds a pattern of selective centralization with distributed implementation. It distinguishes institutionalization from simple centralization. As digital systems scale, cities centralize key conditions of scale, including standards, technical infrastructure and support, and review procedures, while line departments and intermediaries continue to shape implementation by leveraging available digital tools. Enhanced internal digital capacity becomes a critical precondition for this process. City governments can set standards, manage dependencies, review risks, and condition what may scale only when they possess the technical and organizational capacity to make those responsibilities actionable. This shift redistributes authority from actors able to launch pilots toward actors able to condition what may scale. It also turns accountability from a general commitment into practical routines of documentation, review, correction, and, in some cases, termination. The dissertation argues that digital systems become durable institutional capacity only when public authority, internal digital capacity, and control measures are balanced and aligned.