What are the conditions to become smart?

Smart cities (SCs) became a key mission in the European Union’s biggest research programme (Horizon Europe). The urban transition to smartness, making smart decisions and strengthening capabilities for resilience are appreciating today, with such external shocks as the COVID-19 pandemic. Finding the way to become smart is more important than ever. Since literature is mostly engaged with excellent cases, in this paper we analyse the SC strategy of a less-well-performing city: Budapest in Hungary, Central Eastern Europe, using a case-study methodology. We reveal that in the case of Budapest the SC strategy uses a top-down approach that overweighs the deployment of technological solutions to manage urban sustainability issues rather than using a bottom-up and holistic approach. The framework conditions for implementing the SC strategy are rather neglected. In the case of the model for cooperation, Budapest adopts a double-helix model rather than a triple- or quadruple-helix model.