PERCEIVE Project Deliverable Report on Urban Policies for Building Smart Cities

A reasonably well-rounded and comprehensive definition of a smart city may be found in Caraglui et al (2011) who assert that a city is smart when “…..investments in human and societal capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance.” There are many other definitions on offer in the publicly available literature. However, this definition, though complex is arguably necessarily nuanced. It embraces all the various dimensions (social, institutional, economic, communication technology, infrastructure and environmental management) impinging on practical ‘smart city’ thinking. This complexity contributes to the phenomenon whereby most people may not fully understand what is actually meant by the ‘smart city ‘concept (Lima 2016). Perusal of popular media and much ‘grey’ literature also suggests that many cities seem to claim to be ‘smarter’ even though the evidence suggests that strictly speaking (particularly in the light of our preferred definition) they are not. In some of these cases, simply the status of being ‘wired’ is deemed to indicate smartness. Yet being wired with high availability and quality of ICT infrastructure is not a sufficient or adequate definition of a smart or intelligent city. This report begins by introducing the term ‘smart city’ buttressed by some critical consideration of the several definitions that are proffered in the extant literature. Then, the conceptual evolution of the ‘smart city’ construct is set out with reference to smart (city) policies implemented in the EU, mapped with reference to the results of a Boolean web search exercise. This analysis helps to systematically unveil the narrative used by practitioners and policy makers in shaping the perception of smart city policies and projects. Finally, a new index of smartness is implemented based on Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA). The new index will consider both objective measures and citizens’ perceptions of key dimensions offering value in assessing ‘smartness’ in city projects and policies