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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 Conceptualising smart city with dimensions of technology, people and institutions from 2011 by Taewoo Nam and Theresa Prado, published at the 12^th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see their collected core factors for establishing a smart city based on contemporary examples. This article offers strategic principles aligning to the three main dimensions of smart cities: integration of infrastructures and technology-mediated services, social learning for strengthening human infrastructure, and governance for institutional improvement and citizen engagement.

The city as a government unit is growing increasingly larger, more complex and more important as the population ranks of urban areas swell with ever increasing speed. With the rapid increase of the urban population worldwide, cities face a variety of risks, concerns and problems, such as deteriorating conditions in air and transportation or unemployment. The unprecedented rate of urban growth creates an urgency to finding smarter ways to manage the accompanying challenges. Recent practices to make cities better for living have become successful cases for new city development strategies. We need to learn from the successfully progressive practices of these cities, according to Nam and Prado.

A common factor underlies these new practices: the cities need to meet the growing demand to be more liveable cities, being labelled with the smart city term. The concept of smart is not novel but in recent years it has taken on a new dimension of using ICTs to build and integrate critical infrastructures and services of a city. The initiatives of making a city smart have recently emerged as a model to mitigate and remedy current urban problems and make cities better as places to live. Hence some view smart city as an icon of a sustainably liveable city. Yet, so far we see academics have seldom tackled the practical concept. The smart city discussion has been rather concentrated on the ideal images with specific aspects, such as smart transportation or smart mobility, but little research has tackled the enabling factors of a smart city initiative, what really makes a city smart. The smart city discussion has been made without solid conceptualisation. This paper seeks to fill the research gap and conceptualise smart city for both academics’ and practitioners’ use of that concept, with suggesting a framework connecting conceptual variants of the smart city label, key elements for being smart and strategic principles for making a city smart.

The definitions of smart city are various, because the smart term is loaded. In marketing, smart is concentrated on the user perspective and it is user-friendly. In urban planning, smartness is something normative, ideological and strategic at the same time. For governments, smartness is a distinguishing factor for policies and they associate smart with achieving policy success in their jurisdictions. Smartness is technology implies the automatic computing principle, like self-configuration or self-optimisation. Smart ecosystem is a conceptual extension of smart space from the personal context to the larger community and the entire city.

The authors continued with the investigation of specific smart city definitions. Afterwards, they investigated the smart city concept’s cousins, like digital, intelligent, wired, creative, humane or knowledge cities, and smart communities. From these, they were able to identify the three categories of core factors: technology, people, and institution. Given the connection between the factors, a city is smart when investments in human and social capital and IT infrastructure fuel sustainable growth and enhance a quality of life through participatory governance.

Technology is key to being a smart city because of the use of ICT to transform life and work within a city in significant and fundamental ways. A well-functioning infrastructure is absolutely necessary but not enough to become a smart city. IT infrastructure and applications are prerequisites, but without real engagement and willingness to collaborate and cooperate between public institutions, private sector, voluntary organisation, schools and citizens, there is no smart city. Moreover, mobile, virtual and ubiquitous technologies gain importance offering benefits to city dwellers in mobile lifestyle. A smart city provides interoperable, Internet-based government services that enable ubiquitous connectivity to transform key government processes both internally across departments and employees and externally to citizens and businesses.

Importantly, human infrastructure, human capital and education in urban developments are also included in the smart city concept. The smart people concept comprises various factors like affinity to lifelong learning, social and ethnic plurality, flexibility, creativity, open-mindedness and participation in public life. The category of human factors thus highlights creativity, social learning and education. The label smart city points to clever solutions by creative people. Furthermore, a smart city initiative becomes an integrated approach to connecting among entire communities, like governments, businesses, schools, non-profits and individual citizens, creating specific services to address city objectives and advancing collective skills and capacities.

The support of government and policy for governance is fundamental to the design and implementation of smart city initiatives. This category comprises a variety of institutional factors drawing from the discussion of smart community or smart growth initiatives: not just supportive policies but also the role of government, the relationship between government agencies and non-government parties and their governance. Smarter government will do more than simply regulate the outputs of economic and societal systems. It interconnects dynamically with citizens, communities, and businesses in real time to spark growth, innovation and progress. Smarter government means collaborating across departments and with communities – to become more transparent and accountable, to manage resources more effectively, and to give citizens access to information about decisions that affect their lives. At the most fundamental level, smarter government means making operations and services truly citizen-centric.

A successful smart city can be built from top-down or bottom-up approaches, but active involvement from every sector of the community is essential. United efforts create synergy which allows individual projects to build upon each other for faster progress, resulting in the involved, informed and trained critical mass necessary for transformation of how the entire community carries out its work.

Nam and Prado offered strategic principles for making a city smart in order to realise the various visions specified for diverse policy domains, aligning the three categories of core components. The solution should extend beyond technology, but we should still value the indispensable role of technology. Smart city integrates technologies, systems, infrastructures, services, and capabilities into an organic network that is sufficiently complex for unexpected emergent properties to develop. The perception of technology in smart city initiatives stresses integration of systems, infrastructures and services mediated through enabling technologies, but technological innovation is a means to smart city, not an ends.

The emphasis on human infrastructure highlights social learning and education. Towards more progressive smart cities, cities should start with people from the human capital side rather than blindly believing that IT itself can automatically transform and improve cities. To a substantial extent that is already recognised, the critical factor in any successful city is its people and how they interact. Stronger approaches to awareness, education and leadership offer services that are accessible to all citizens, get rid of barriers related to language, culture, education, skills development and disabilities.

Governance encapsulates collaboration, cooperation, partnership, citizen engagement, and participation. One characteristic is collaboration among different functional sectors and parties government, business, academics, non-profit and voluntary organisations and others, and among different jurisdictions within a given geographical region. City government should share concepts, visions, goals, priorities, and even strategic plans of smart city with the public and stakeholders. Leadership of key leaders and their strong support of the smart city vision are fundamental to the success of smart city. The role of leadership is pivotal both within government and for its relation with citizens.

Smart city is an organic connection among technological, human and institutional components. Nowadays, the use of smart captures innovative and transformative changes driven by new technologies. However, social factors other than smart technologies are central to smart cities. Leading a smart city initiative requires a comprehensive understanding of the complexities and interconnections among social and technical factors of services and physical environments in a city.

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

1. Smart city initiatives have three core factor groups: technology, people, and institutions.
2. To transform a city to a smart city, three strategic principles were offered: the integration of infrastructures and technology-mediated services, social learning for strengthening human infrastructure, and governance for institutional improvement and citizen engagement.
3. Leading a smart city initiative requires a comprehensive understanding of urban complexities among social, technical, environmental and governmental factors.

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

1. How do we create smart citizens and what do we do with the current existing ones?
2. Why is the environment missing from this approach? If smart city includes sustainability as well, where is that aspect?
3. Do government officials have the knowledge about urban complexity? If not, how can we help them? How can we encourage the decision-makers to include experts into the decision-making processes?

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