Smart City trends and ambitions

Research into smart city projects and applications has been increasing in recent years (Meijer & Bolivar, 2015). The smart city concept is mostly considered from a technology-oriented perspective that stresses the usage of data technologies, big data and ICT to ‘smarten up’ cities. In contrast, attention to soft aspects of the smart city – i.e. smart governance, smart people and social learning – seems to be limited both in academia and in practice. Moreover, what seems to be largely missing in the literature is empirical insight into the extent to which different smart city aspects are factually known of and applied in different geographical contexts. The aim of this contribution is to make a contextual comparison of smart city applications based on a mainly quantitative empirical analysis. Therein, in particular emphasis will be put on the knowledge government practitioners in the Netherlands have of smart aspects and to what extent they are willing and able to implement smart aspects in their specific local and regional contexts. The results show that both in the Netherlands and worldwide there are huge ambitions to develop and implement smart city applications, but that to some extent factual activities are lagging behind. Reasons for this mostly relate to lack of awareness of the possibilities and lack of financial and political priority. This is especially true for the smaller-sized cities in the Netherlands. When this will be resolved, actual activities are more likely to live up to the huge ambitions regarding the smart city concept.