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Top1. Introduction
The United Nation E-Government Survey (the biennial evaluation of e-government across the world) ranked Korea a top notch in 2010, 2012, and 2014. The year of 2016 slipped down Korea to the third rank, following after the United Kingdom and Singapore. In 2018, Korea was ranked the third again behind the two new top rankers, Denmark and Australia. Global top 3 is such an excellent performance in the national level from an outsider’s view, but domestic critiques have concerned about the future of the Korean e-government in multiple aspects. The criticism includes national innovation based on cutting-edge technologies, usability issues, security issues, and interoperability issues among others. In addition, those with a high expectation on participatory democracy may concern performance of Korean e-government, which is full of noises from mobs more than civic voices.
Korean smart city initiatives face the same concern (substantial outcomes compared to investments and expectations). It is mostly from government organizations and public agencies that citizens hear about contribution of smart cities to the quality of their lives. A government should play as a main proponent for e-government, along with other organizational and institutional proponents for smart cities. The role of government has kept decisive to Korean smart cities. Smart cities in Korea were kicked off as the name of U-City (ubiquitous city) in the heyday of Korean e-government. From 2008, U-City, the earlier version of Korean smart cities, put heavy emphasis on the top-down rather than bottom-up approach, redevelopment rather than regrowth, and short-term returns rather than long-term sustainability. Over-confidence based on experiences in globally-recognized success of Korean e-government and ICT industry prevailed across many leaders and stakeholders of U-City. However, such over-confidence turned out a paradox of success (Cunha & Putnam, 2019; Waldman et al., 2019). One cannot say that infrastructures and services made through U-City projects failed to improve many cities in Korea, but U-City may be carefully considered failing over time (not failure at a certain point of time), given huge investments and high citizen expectations. Related studies lauded U-City as a pioneering useful benchmark for other countries in technological sides (Carvalho, 2012; Hwang, 2009; Lee et al., 2008; Shin, 2009; Shwayri, 2013; Yigitcanlar & Lee, 2014) and thus have been very cautious in making critical comments on U-City.
The paradox of success stems from possible reasons of failing. E-government might not need collaborative governance at its earlier phase. Its purpose (i.e., improvements in terms of efficiency, anti-corruption, openness, transparency, responsiveness, and participation) was so clear that opposition is difficult to gain legitimacy inside and outside government. The initiation and further development of e-government in Korea succeeded without collaborative governance of diverse actors and stakeholders. This successful experience in well-designed, elite-based, and top-down approaches to the technology-driven government innovation has moved to smart cities (U-City earlier) in Korea. However, e-government and smart cities may be fundamentally different in levels, scopes, and impacts.
This study focuses on the smart city case of Korea. As addressed before, U-City was an earlier version of Korean smart cities and even the earliest version of smart cities over the globe. The label “ubiquitous” per se may reflect state-forced, government-driven, and top-down strategies because making urban services and infrastructures ubiquitous requires related governments to provide services and infrastructures in a consistent manner with a particular smart city and across all smart-labeled cities. With this conjecture, the study distinguishes between ubiquitous cities and smart ones from the perspective of governance and discusses the evolution from ubiquitous to smart cities with alignment to the case of Korea. Normatively saying, top-down, state-driven, and elitism-based approaches to ubiquitous cities should change toward bottom-up, locality-driven, and citizen-centered approaches to smart cities. However, this change in governance does not come easy.