Smart City Collaboration: A Review and an Agenda for Establishing Sustainable Collaboration
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors present a literature review of collaboration in smart city governance. They focus especially on Amsterdam as there is ample work to examine. The contributions of this research are both validation of previous ideas and theory building.
Overall, I would like to see more direct writing about what the authors find, and somewhat less of explanations of concepts or theory from others. The Van Winden et al 2016 was cited extensively, for instance. It's not clear what the authors did to test the claims Van Winden et al. made. Section 3.2.4.3, as an example, consists four sentences, of which three cite Van Winden. What is the point of this section? I don't mean that to be dismissive or rude, this is a sincere question. I was looking for direct evidence from the research done to validate the Van Winden claims, but they are just stated and then the authors move on. Throughout the paper there should be more emphasis on what the authors did directly, not what other have written. I think more liberal use of quotes from the reviewed publications could help with this.
The authors do not get into whether collaboration leads to better outcomes. Is there a way to assess this? It seems that collaboration is theorized, then it is practiced, but there isn't any assessment of whether it is any better than the status quo. I realize this is a somewhat different question, but in the discussion this could be addresses. I leave this to the authors to decide.
As the paper is a review and includes descriptive analysis, the approach is sound. I don't doubt the conclusions as presented, but there isn't a counterfactual of smart cities without collaboration, so to my point above, we don't know if it works. I also think there is opportunity to explore the role of public involvement more, but again, that is a somewhat different paper.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1,
responses as per the attached.
Thank you for your contribution to our paper.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors, editors,
I read with lot of interest your contribution that includes a wealth of information. But, I find the article relatively hard to read - I suggest a reorganisation.
In general there far too many sections ->sub sub... sections for example 3.1.3.5.1.
My feeling is that the paper should reorganised arround a set of short and clear questions:
- What is collaboration?
- Why collaborating?
- How we collaborate?
- With who we collaborate?
All these points are in the document in section 3.
For the intro a short definition (at least in your views) of what a smart city is is missing. And in one or two lines are there "not" smart cities? Why do you focus on smart cities?
Section 2, easy to read and the procedure followed to selcet documents is clear.
Section 3, for me this should be reorganised and linked with the 4 questions I have already mentioned. The beginning of section 3.1.2 (lines 156 to 175) could be in section 3.1.1, And from lines 177-193 could be merged in section 3.1.3.
It took me sometimes to understand section 3.1.3 it has to be made clearer that their could be up to 4 types of collaboration depending on actors, the famous Helix you speak about if I am not confused.
There are some points that are missing (and could be added in a few lines) is there a kind of "historical" order in the set up of collaboration, for example first within the administration, then with NGO then with citizens? Do we need ultimately the 4 pillars?
Section 3.1.3.5 is cryptic to m. It seems that no formal/legal rules are need to set up some collaboration but I might be wrong. It reminds me the principle of micro-regions = voluntary grouping of municipalities beyond administrative boundaries.
Section 3.2, the case of Amsterdam is really interesting. However, I see a problem there is the Metropolitan Area and the City sometimes it is not clear when you speak about the city and the area. For example line 336 is it the city/municipality or the area?
Again it would be interesting to have some historical landmarks to see how long it took to put things in place.
What is interesting in this section is to see what works, what is not working and sometime why. But then you have something missing, section 3.2.4.1 (again to many sub-sections) you speak about funding but it does not appear in section 3.1 I am surprised that no theoretical/framing paper speaks about it.
In passing, when you quote inpart an author put (...) instead of ...
Line 580 what is ULL?
Consider to revise table that is particularly ugly... The vertical line are not useful left justify the text. Center title of columns.
Last for the conclusion I would go back the 4 mains questions: What? Why? How? With who? and to really summarises the key points.
Hope this help.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2,
Thank you for your contribution to our paper.
Detailed responses attached.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
