City dashboards and the achilles’ heel of smart cities: Putting governance in action and in space

City dashboards have developed in the last few years as ways for aggregating and disseminating data related to urban areas to a wide range of citizens and city users. Such data come from official sources, in line with a growing policy of opening (public) data, as well as taken from the ‘big data’ realm. Dashboards were developed with different aims and design, in many cases still representing academic experiments and tests of city – to citizens interface and communication channels, rather than being considered as a consistent part of urban spatial planning policies. In many cases – as is the case of many studies and reports on urban areas – dashboards are used to produce indicators and indexes related to the performances of cities. However, such indexes are seldom used in planning as benchmarks for policies. In such sense, the use – or non-use - of such indicators in planning and governing urban territories remain one of the ‘Achilles’ heels’ of (Smart) cities. The idea of this paper, in line with other research carried on by different research groups, is of changing the model of urban dashboards from a linear one (that follows the logic of: data input – processing – visualization – information output) to a circular one (data input – processing – visualization – information output – indicators – use of indicators in planning – new data production – new data input). Here we propose a model for inserting data (results) of policies announced at urban level into such a framework, in order to allow users to understand the level of application of the different policies in time and the policy makers to evaluate the effects of such policies in different moments, so to calibrate their application in the future.