Questioning if Macro-Systemic Top-Down Approaches Should Be Used to Develop Smart Cities of the Future

Cities differ greatly from one to another, even if they serve the same essential purposes. Moreover, they should collaborate at all levels for producing synergistic effects, therefore, their major smart solutions should be standardized or at least compatible, whilst adapted to the local contexts. Cities are systems of systems and contain a large variety of components, each of them presenting different characteristics. Given the vast range of technological choices and the unforgiving overall pressure, governors struggle to implement best specific smart solutions for their cities, by usually adopting bottom-up methods, thus, endangering future possible compatibilities with other local or international systems. This research stresses the importance of top-down smart city deployments, by acknowledging also the local specificities. It investigates the status of relevant international contributions, questioning what kind of approaches should be applied by public administrations. The results point out to complex challenges that exist by revealing the status of standardization proceedings, the authors’ perspective on the enabling technologies and their dimensions, as well as a related case study concerning a local community of Romania so as to bring the beforementioned issues to light. The main objective of this research is to highlight the associated problematics and draw attention to the urgent need of a new macro-systemic top-down attitude for developing smart cities.