The Smart City as mega project: an investigation of original vision and iterative changes – drawing on the COVID effect

The ‘Smart City’ is a topic widely discussed in different academic fields. This research investigates the Smart city as a mega project due to the time and budget it consumes. The research has found that some iterative changes (e.g. profit) could reshape projects and planning away from what was originally envisaged and, potentially negatively impact the overall smart city project. The absence of citizens has the potential to detach the project from a focus, in part due to the missing information about actual needs. The aim of this paper is to investigate the reasons why a Smart City vision becomes shifted during the delivery by which the citizens voice becomes lost. Recently COVID-19 has demonstrated vividly that technologies integral to Smart City developments can have a transformative impact on life in cities, which may increase the interests in smart city building. The use of such technologies has also focused attention on the place of the citizen in the technology ecosystem – drawing on the quality of life of citizens as a central theme for the vision of any Smart City