SMART CITIES, SMART TOURISM? THE CASE OF THE CITY OF PORTO

The so-called Smart Cities have been playing an important role in the academic literatureas well as in the agenda of public policies. With the forward thinking of “creating” newurban development models, the cities intend to strategically positioning themselves and atthe same time develop cooperation networks. Frequently using the Information andCommunication Technologies (while as a means to an end and not as an end itself), thecities try to assure a greater economic competitiveness, the environmental sustainabilityand the reinforcement of citizenship (calling out to people to participate, in the scope of aninclusive logic and in an appeal to creativity and social responsibility).Even the 2020European strategy promotes this development.The geographic scope of the study islimited to the city of Porto. This is justified by the fact that, in 2015, Porto was one the fiveEuropean cities selected to participate in the GrowSmarter (model of organization of citiesof the future), an ambitious project with the objective of making Europe more sustainableand environmentally intelligent.Besides that, the Portuguese Smart Cities Index, 2016, points out the city of Oporto as thePortuguese city with better results in what concerns the main vectors of intelligence(policy, strategies and projects implemented, edification, mobility, energy and smartservices).At the same time, in the international press, the city of Porto appears as areference for its architectural wealth and as one of the more indicated Europeandestinations for one who would like to enjoy quality holidays at a reasonable price.That isperhaps why Shermans Travel presents Porto as one of the top 10 destinations forintelligent tourists. The purpose of the present study is to understand if the emergence ofsmart cities can be in some way connected to the appearance of smart tourism. For such apurpose, we will study the city of Porto and a survey will be conducted among the touristsof the city.This article compiles some of the first results of the study, referring to the datacollected during the months of August and September of 2017, and intends mainly to setout some hypotheses about the motivation for the choice of a tourist destination, that willbe developed in future works