Power in Networks and the Urban Space

Abstract

The urban space paper is introduced by a brief “report” on the founding of Rome by Romulus; he traced a furrow and thereby defined the urban space. The core of the paper, however, defines the urban space by the dimension of collective decision making expressed in the form of voting games. It offers a power index analysis of the relationship between the agents of a network – applying the Public Good Index (PGI) and the Public Value (PV) –, reinterprets previous work by Holler and Rupp (2019), presents new numerical results and gives alternative interpretations. The results confirm our expectations: an increase of links and thereby connectedness tends to increase the power of an agent. The message for policymaking in the urban space is evident. This motivated us to discuss the question of why we should be interested in evaluating the power distribution within a network. Here, our focus is on the accountability of the agents – and the Smart City concept.

Keywords: Urban space, network, collective decision making, power index analysis, responsibility, Smart City, Public Good Index, and Public Value.

JEL Classification: C70, C72, D72, D85, L14, Z13