The contextualization of smart city technologies: An international comparison

Abstract

In smart city practice, urban policymakers show to focus foremost on the technologies sec. This often leads to quite uniform, technocratic and corporate-led ways of handling urban issues. In contrast, more attention should be paid to the question of appropriateness of smart city technologies. This entails that quite uniform urban issues in different contexts ask for distinctive approaches and as a consequence, for specific smart city technologies. In other words, the context plays a decisive role in the choice for the urban issues themselves and in the ways to ‘solve’ or govern these, and in the choice for specific smart city technologies. This study examines the role of context in the handling of urban issues with the help of smart city technologies in three smart city projects: Hangzhou City Brain (China), Singapore Smart Nation, and Amsterdam Smart City (the Netherlands). The results reveal that the specific contextual factors influence urban city developments and the application therein of smart city technologies. This includes: a technology-driven management approach to fixing Hangzhou's traffic congestion; a mixed technocratic and platform-oriented approach to effecting transformation in Singapore's government services, businesses and urban living; and a platform-oriented, open-minded mechanism to improve Amsterdam's livability and economic prosperity. This paper concludes that rather than treating the technology itself as smart, the real smartness in smart cities is to develop and implement appropriate technologies according to its local context to solve targeted urban issues.