Page 77 - U4SSC Blockchain for smart sustainable cities

(3) The blockchain for cities is innovative
The innovative aspect defines the smartness of a solution. It elaborates on how to use IT to either
transform existing processes, better serve the citizens (such as an example of smart administrative
model), offering new and innovative services to the citizens and residents and new service delivery,
providing new ways of regulation and innovating the partnership. The two types of innovation are
explicitly associated with “smart governance”. Several innovative behaviours characterize smart
governance, such as the empowerment of the residents to the role of regulators in the city or the
partnership, which is defined by the willingness of cities to propose collaborative urban governance
also called “the smart urban collaborative model” of governance. Innovativeness is intrinsic to the
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B4C use-cases as blockchain is disruptive. All the use-cases consider that their smart city initiative using
blockchain technology is innovative in at least one of the aspects. However, the innovativeness needs
to be considered in direct relation to the specific context.

For example, the use-case of land registry in Georgia is innovative in all the aspects as it did not exist
previously in the country. However, for the same project of land registry in Sweden, the innovative
aspect aims to improve the existing land registry process. The project remained at the experimentation
level and “it was never integrated into the production system of the land registry” as the existing land
registry system is effective and the innovative process was not enough to justify the need to migrate
to the blockchain system.

(4) The blockchain for cities supports smart city values

Smart city values are described by the provision of better infrastructure and service, the improvement
in job creation and economic growth, the entrenchment of civic values, supporting social inclusion,
equity and fairness, protecting the environment and sustainability and improving city governance and
engaging the citizens in governance. There are two dominant shared values. The first one is to provide
the citizens and the city with better infrastructure and service. Several public services are moving
towards blockchain-based systems mainly motivated by the security factor. The use of smart contract
or decentralized autonomous systems based on blockchain technology is often presented as more
secure, reducing uncertainty manipulation, corruption and human errors. It is adopted unanimously
by all the cases (see Table 5). The second shared value is the entrenchment of civic values, supporting
social inclusion, and equality. Indeed, the use of blockchain supports these values by reducing the risk
of falsification, improving transparency and ensuring privacy and anonymity, among other things. The
use-cases often rely on the public key-based identity to provide pseudo-anonymity protection, such as
identities for e-voting (i.e. active citizen and e-voting) and tax payers (i.e. debt relief case or financial
emergency) the event-ticket holder (i.e. Stadjerpass case), patients or employees (i.e. Healthy). They
also rely on encryption such as zero proof system to ensure privacy allowing only to the right party to
open and read the content even though the information is diffused and received by multiple parties.

_________
i The readers of the data are the participants who can access the records in the system.
j The writers are the users who can submit a record or a transaction in the blockchain.
k The inputs represent technologies and tools that can be used to address the problems. The context is related to the specific situation and core
values and drivers of the city or community. The transformation considers the decisions regarding approaches, governance, and the outcomes are the
benefits and innovations resulted from the transformation.

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