Improving Smart City Design: A Conceptual Model for Governing Complex Smart City Ecosystems

Smart city concept is a viable nominee to solve the dilemmas urbanization creates globally. By means of digital technologies like Internet-of-Things, artificial intelligence and data analytics cities aim to optimize city performances like mobility, environment, security, health care and social services. Furthermore, cities actively endorse usage of digital technologies to foster digitalization and new business innovation to nurture local economy and social well-being. Smart city market is growing, but simultaneously fragmented smart city markets and initiatives face challenges with governance, ecosystem orchestration and continuity. Transformation to smart city is a complex long-term process, which requires collaboration with heterogeneous stakeholder groups and capabilities to evaluate wide spectrum of new digital technologies and their fitness to diverse city functions and processes. This sets high demands for the smart city governance and management. A smart city conceptual model (SCCM) presented in this paper aims to assist cities with this endeavor. SCCM observes complex smart cities from organizational and technical perspectives providing practical instrument for smart city stakeholders to lead city towards data and digital technology assisted smart city. SCCM considers four primary dimensions, strategy, technology, governance and stakeholders. Each primary dimension is complemented with sub-elements, which all together form meaningful interrelations and provides comprehensive and systematic approach for the smart city design, development and implementation