This book examines the leadership practices and foresight needed for smart cities. The book begins by exploring the evolving definition of a smart city. Then, it considers the problems with smart cities and the need for foresight in the management of these cities. The last part of the book offers a model of strategic foresight based on understanding, anticipating, and shaping the future, with applicability to organizations. This book offers a new conception of smart cities that will appeal to researchers and policymakers interested in futures thinking and strategy.
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Yes, you can access Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities by José A. LugoSantiago in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Human Resource Management. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Smart cities are notably, cities. One cannot lose sight of that. Cities form the spaces where many of us live our lives. It is within cities where we conduct much of our business, meet socially with others, and wonder about the cultural norms sometimes separating us from others. In many respects, cities give us identity and form the economic fulcrum which helps facilitate social structures, quality of life, defining cultures, as well as government and political activism.
There is something special about cities. In my years serving, leading, and studying leadership, I have come to visit many cities, mostly in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, the Pacific, and Southwest Asia. Each visit was met with wonder, even if it was not my first time visiting. Each city was painted with distinct colors of culture, geography, mobility mediums, streets, people, and, of course, forms of technology. The mix of those features made each of these cities unique, not one feature, but the mix of all of them. When I think about my experiences in the cities of Tokyo, Doha, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Paris, Nancy, Barcelona, New York, and even my own city, San Antonio (Texas), I can see the aforementioned is true. One should not lose sight of that, especially as many city officials partnered with tech giants to jump into the race to transform their cities from uniqueness to a popular and undefined global type: the “Smart City.”
Although the literature in regard to smart cities is relatively new, the media increasingly has become saturated with news and commentary about the smart city. One prominent visual of this phenomenon is depicted in Fig. 1.1. One can see that the last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the number of published articles about smart cites found within academic journal databases. Yet, there is no universal agreed-upon version of the origin of the smart city term or what a smart city actually is. (The latter will be discussed in more detail in the next section.) What follows is a brief summary of the literature in regard to what several authors note could be seen as the origin of the term, smart city.
Fig. 1.1
Smart cities publication activity in academic journals, 1980–2019
(Source Author’s own making by using excel spreadsheet to plot the data. The chart depicts the articles published on “Smart Cities” from 1980–2019 by four academic database search engines—ProQuest, JSTOR, ABI/INFORM, and SAGE Journals. String “Smart Cities” searched on 10 May 2019)
In researching the literature to understand the origin of the term smart city, I consulted the pool of articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Remarkably, this pool of articles was only 4% of the volume of articles depicted in Fig. 1.1. These journal articles were preferred over the remaining 96% of the literature, which was not peer-reviewed. In the case of hunting for answers on the origin of the term smart city (and later in trying to frame and explore a definition of a smart city), the peer-review process was important. The peer-review process acts as a mechanism to validate research and confirms the work of the authors has met research standards, thus endorsing the quality and impact of the work in the particular subject area (Etkin, 2014; Roberts & Shambrook, 2012). Given the relative novelty of the subject area of smart cities and the knowledge generated from it, the prominence given to peer-reviewed articles facilitates the strength of answers to our questions.
The literature on smart cities reveals the term, since its first appearance in the early 1990s, may have evolved from the different descriptions which attempted to describe a city’s aspirations through the use of technology. The most pronounced of them are the intelligent city, information city, knowledge city, digital city, and ubiquitous city (Anthopoulos, 2015; Dameri & Ricciardi, 2015; Lee, Hancock, & Hu, 2014). Other notable researchers argue the term was a reflection (and the combination) of the literature addressing “smart growth” and the “intelligent city” (Hollands, 2008; Vanolo, 2014). The term smart growth, for example, was grounded in the United States’ 1980s framework of New Urbanism, which then later dominated the legislative vision of smart growth since the 1990s and aimed at urban design and transportation planning agendas intended to create high-density urban centers (McCarthy, 2017; Vanolo, 2014). In regard to the term intelligent city, it described a framework of a knowledge economy which had human and social capital as its engines of growth; as such, it combined the driving forces of rising knowledge and innovation with the spread and use of the Internet to produce technological innovation which sustained economic development (Hollands, 2008; Komninos, 2011; Lee et al., 2014).
In my research of the literature, one could see that the term smart city was defined inconsistently. Although it may have emerged from the terms described previously, once the term “smart city” emerged, it was not adopted uniformly. It was, therefore, used to describe concepts which had connotations of technology, interconnectivity, and/or cyber traits of the city. This was also corroborated by other international researchers of the literature, some claiming that much of the adoption was inconsistent with previous definitions which preserved a role for citizens in the process of a city’s becoming “smart.” The cementing of the term’s adoption seemed to have taken place in 2005 when a number of multinational technology companies began offering complex information systems to integrate urban operations and infrastructure (Klimovski, Pinteric, & Saparniene, 2016; Simonofski, Serral Asensio, De Smedt, & Snoeck, 2018).
The move from several of these multinational companies to the smart city space was a strategic decision which proved profitable, especially as a response to the 2008 recession (Paroutis, Bennett, & Heracleous, 2014). But staying visible in that space, now well-known as the smart city market, was a struggle for many of these multinational companies and in 2009 IBM filed for a trademark which was approved in 2011 as “Smarter Cities” as part of the company’s campaign to position itself well in a market which continued to grow more contested (Söderstrom, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; U.S. Patent No. 79077782, 2011). The adoption of the term not only has grown in popularity for the reasons stated above as well as its underlying syntax assumptions (i.e., smart versus its opposite), but it has also raised a number of debates about what constitutes the framework of a smart city, and therefore, an evolution has occurred.
Evolving Frameworks
The previous section briefly summarized how we arrived at the use of the term smart city. This use of the term attempted to designate a brand formed to simply identify cities which focused on the use of Information and communications technology (ICT) to better manage functioning of different aspects of city operations. Use of the term also strove to carve a passage for a city narrative which ended up creating a very lucrative, untapped market for key multinational companies such as IBM, Cisco, and Siemens. This last point merits considerable attention as it opened large economic incentives and a huge, new, and untapped market. And how big was that market?
In 2014, for example, the smart city’s market value projection for the year 2016 was $39.5 billion, and for the year 2020, that estimate was projected to be $20.2 billion (Söderstrom et al., 2014). Those projections were not far from the real numbers. In 2018, the International Data Corporation (2019) (IDC) published its market research on spending done on smart city initiatives; the worldwide expenditure in 2018 was $81 billion, surpassing the 2016 projection by over $41 billion, with new projections for the years 2019 and 2022 of $95.8 billion and $158 billion respectively.
The above-mentioned ways of thinking (cities’ ways of thinking about how they could employ the use of new technologies to manage city activities), combined with multinational business offerings contributed to a range of evolutionary city frameworks giving way to what many today call smart cities. In other words, a variety of frameworks have appeared over the years, although in recent years the smart city framework has been the most visible and aggressively pursued. The potential for lucrative endeavors, scholars point out, has led key multinational businesses to move into public/private partnerships to help fund and employ many of their offerings, while at the same time profit greatly from that large city market (Ferraris, Gabriele, Stefano, & Carayannis, 2018; Scuotto, Ferraris, & Bresciani, 2016; Townsend, 2013). (The reasons and tactics of those pursuits that made the smart city framework the lucrative pursuit will be lat...
