ICT policy in European cities: a comparative approach

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is widely accepted as a potentially beneficial set of instruments, which may improve the welfare and competitiveness of nations and cities. Nowadays both public and private actors aim to exploit the expected benefits of ICT developments. This paper seeks to investigate the potential of ICT policy at an urban level, and in particular to shed more light on various factors that influence urban ICT polities in the public domain. Firstly, we draw attention to the definition of ICT policy in order to Capture different (direct and indirect) public actions that address the ICT field so as to enable a meaningful comparison of polities among different cities. A conceptual framework, designed to improve our understanding of the driving forces of urban ICT polities, is proposed. It contains three groups of factors: personal backgrounds of decision-makers (or public actors), their perceptions of ICT, and the city's characteristics. Interviews with urban decision-makers in different European cities in 3 countries (Austria, Spain and The Netherlands) are used to analyse the relationships between urban characteristics (e.g. size, nature of problems, urban image), personal attitudes towards ICT, administrative features of the cities concerned, and perceptions of ICT conditions in cities.