Being Smarter in the Pursuit of a Smart City

The purpose of this keynote paper is to stimulate new ideas and collaborative discussions. It explores ideas of what a city is before looking at lessons we can learn from the effort of others. It argues there are two dominant strategies that need to combine. These are examples of top-down and bottom-up strategies. The paper also looks at examples that argue a Dynamic Capability perspective which seems to hold promise, especially for agile development. However, all of these examples have issues and so the paper concludes a blended approach is most likely to succeed. This requires the establishment of shared services agenda between a number of cities and the partitioning of key issues in a smart city. Each municipality should target one theme before encouraging proof-of-concepts. There is also a call for municipalities to move from a reactive-transactional to a proactive-relational relationship with citizens that uses the idea of co-creation during a pilot project. This approach reduces the R&D cost for cities to become Smart Cities and is part of a transformation that will also unlock other potentialities.

This paper reviews existing ad hoc approaches to the development of a smart city and puts forward an argument for strategic cooperation amongst different cities