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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Smart city implementation and discourses: An integrated conceptual model, the case of Vienna from 2018 by Victoria Fernandez-Anez, José Miguel Fernández-Güell, and Rudolf Giffinger published in the Cities journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how citizens can be involved in smart city initiatives and their capacity to face urban challenges. This article creates a conceptual model for the involvement of inhabitants, through the example of Vienna Smart City strategy.

Smart cities are usually seen as a tool to solve urban challenges in an increasingly urbanised world. These challenges include inequality, pollution, ageing population, insecurity and others. And although smart city seen as the tool, there is no consensus on the definition for smart city. Basically, two main approaches can be identified among smart city scientists and practitioners. One propOses a comprehensive conceptualisation of the smart city and the other is developed through sector-based initiatives and projects in one or a few specific areas. The implementation of smart cities is still related to these sector-specific and partial understanding, in part because of the limitations of governance and financing tools. Therefore, it is necessary to bridge the gap between the sector-wide implementation and theoretical wide understanding of smart cities.

To reach this comprehensive smart city concept, governance is gradually placed at the core with the need for integrated approaches and stakeholder involvement and engagement in decision-making. This latter seems to be a key element for smart cities. Thus, it can be assumed that narrowing the gap between stakeholders’ vision of smart city initiatives and the implementation of certain projects may make a decisive difference to the success of smart city strategies. This research has the objective to develop a conceptual model with stakeholders’ involvement and then to use this model to synthesise the opinions of different involved agents and compare their attitudes to a comprehensive overview of the most relevant projects implemented in a corresponding smart city strategy.

This research proposed a new model for the smart city as an integrated and multi-dimensional system that aims to address urban challenges based on a multi-stakeholder partnership. This model links the three main issues identified in previous models:

1. The key role of governance and stakeholders involvement
2. The importance of displaying a comprehensive vision of smart city projects and dimensions and
3. The understanding of the smart city a tool to tackle urban challenges

This new model places the stakeholders at the centre as governance structures are considered the core of the smart city. There are four stakeholder groups distinguished: political, including government institutions and political parties, social with civil society experts and institutions, economic stakeholders comprising a wide range of public and private companies, and knowledge stakeholders including universities and research centres in the city. All these groups overlap and experts and institutions may belong to more than one, while citizenship overlaps all the subsystems.

Smart city, as the comprehensive vision, stands at the confluence of the spatial and technological subsystems as an answer to urban challenges. Initiatives are organised around stakeholder groups and urban challenges to respond to the requirements of different stakeholders. Initiatives can and should affect more than one group, thus increasing efficiency in urban management. Since governance initiatives tend to lead the development of smart city dimensions, they are places at the centre of the conceptual model. There are also two supporting subsystems – spatial and technological. The elements in the human-built urban environment form the urban spatial subsystem – streets, housing, open spaces, etc. The technological subsystem consists of the various technological tools developed in the city and is mainly based on ICT and information transfer, connecting the elements. Lastly, the environment subsystem remains outside the model as the basis and support for any urban development.

Smart cities are implemented as a tool to respond to a multitude of challenges – this model can only be defined by understanding the challenges and trends that affect the city. Citizenship and stakeholder groups pose important challenges that the different urban functional subsystems need to answer. The challenges raised by the stakeholders include living and services, environment, mobility and infrastructure, economy, and people. These are closely related to more general global trends also affecting European cities which are outside of the model, and these are: climate change, social polarisation, need for new governance models, global urbanisation, economic instability, and increasing importance of new technologies.

As a result, the conceptual model shows various stakeholders and urban subsystems in relation to the different smart city dimensions and initiatives and the contextual challenges affecting cities. This model offers a comprehensive vision of a city and serves as an instrument to achieve greater coherence in smart city initiatives. However, the authors did not stop with creating the model. Afterwards, there was the pre-validation with a group of European experts which resulted in changes in the model. Finally, the model was investigated through the Vienna Smart City strategy in terms of stakeholders, type of projects developed and the challenges and the global trends they were addressing.

The Vienna Smart City strategy was launched in 2011, and in 2013, the municipality started the strategic process involving stakeholders from different departments and experts from the city. This process led to the Smart City Wien Framework Strategy in 2014, aimed at providing guidelines for the development of smart city initiatives and projects, with three lines: quality of living, resources and innovation. The authors’ conceptual model was investigated and modified to fit Vienna’s strategy and specific situation. These modifications included more stakeholder groups, projects and the implementation, discourses with stakeholders, challenges, etc.

At the case of Vienna, in the stakeholder groups, the public sector unquestionably takes the central role due to their being as the largest stakeholder group. The project analysis revealed that far more private companies are involved in the projects than universities and that civil society is not involved in the smart city strategy. Regarding the dimensions, the greatest number of projects address the environmental dimension, but it was only fourth most important in the stakeholders’ definitions. The definitions stated governance and people on the first place, which in the projects are only following the environmental segment. Living and mobility was mentioned even less in the projects and implementation, though in varying frequency, and economy was the least mentioned in both implementation and theory. Regarding the global trends, both implementation and discourses mentioned climate change as the most important trend. The other global trends were dividing among experts and stakeholders.

Based on the comparison of the original and the modified concept, there are guidelines to be drawn to improve this specific strategy. These guidelines aim to narrow the gap between the actual implantation and the visions and to promote the inclusion of citizens and the political, social, economic and knowledge stakeholder groups:

• Smart cities are not predominantly understood as technology-driven entities in the discourses
• More balanced stakeholder involvement is needed with increasing the collaboration between the different stakeholders
• Maintaining efforts and increasing strategies for social awareness in environmental projects
• Increasing the focus on governance with an increased number of projects on governance to reach a more balanced initiative
• Greater effort to promote social inclusion and foster human and social capital as social polarisation was one the major global challenges
• Increasing efforts in the economy dimension by promoting social and human capital

The conceptual model was useful to identify unbalanced initiatives based on the projects, implementation and stakeholder discourses. The conceptual model highlights the lack of correspondence between the equal prioritisation of challenges and the unbalanced development of the dimensions. The model was also effective at representing a complex and comprehensive vision for the smart city which can guide future discourse, actions and projects.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. The authors created a conceptual model for creating and analysing smart city initiatives and strategies with the stakeholders in the centre.
2. This conceptual model can represent the complex and comprehensive vision of the smart cities, but needs to be handled with care and modified to specific situations.
3. This conceptual model is a useful tool to analyse current situations and identify key points and future actions.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How can be the discourse and the implementation side more connected? Is it enough to know that there is gap between them, or are there specific steps to take to bridge that gap?
2. Is there a real need for balance in the projects? The authors advocate for balance among the projects, but if every city has the same balanced approach, then cities would be less unique.
3. What do you see in your city as a controversy where the discourse differs from the implementation?
4. Are you part of the discourse in your city? How could you be more involved in creating the future of your city? What would you do for the better future of your city?

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