The City as a Platform: Exploring the Potential Role(s) of the City in Mobile Service Provision through a Mobile Service Platform Typology

This exploratory paper applies an existing framework for the analysis of platform types in mobile services to the urban context and explores the role(s) cities may take up in the development and deployment of mobile services. It first presents the platform typology that will be used, provides some contextual information on the concept of Smart Cities and then applies several diverging cases to it by means of validation. The paper concludes that having control over value-adding assets such as datasets pertaining to the city is a more important factor for governments to take into account than solely developing a customer relationship with its inhabitants.