Smart City implementation and discourses: An integrated conceptual model. The case of Vienna

Abstract In recent years many initiatives have been developed under the Smart City label in a bid to provide a response to challenges facing cities today. The concept has evolved from a sector-based approach to a more comprehensive view that places governance and stakeholders' involvement at the core of strategies. However, Smart City implementation requires lowering the scale from the strategy to the project level. Therefore, the ability of Smart City initiatives to provide an integrated and systematic answer to urban challenges is constantly being called into question. Stakeholder involvement in both the projects and the city strategy is key to developing a governance framework that allows an integrated and comprehensive understanding. This can only be done if Smart City strategies take the stakeholders' opinion into account and seek a compromise between their views and the implementation of the strategy. Multiple attempts have been made to analyse Smart Cities, but tools are needed to understand their complexity and reflect the stakeholders' role in developing Smart City initiatives and their capacity to face urban challenges. This paper pursues two objectives: (A) to develop a conceptual model capable of displaying an overview of (a) the stakeholders taking part in the initiative in relation to (b) the projects developed and (c) the challenges they face; and (B) to use this model to synthesise the opinion of different stakeholders involved in Smart City initiatives and compare their attitudes to the key projects implemented in a corresponding SC strategy. The methodology combines project analysis with surveys and interviews with different groups of key stakeholders (governments, private companies, universities and research centres, and civil society) through text analysis. The conceptual model is developed through discussions with different European stakeholders and is applied to the case of the Vienna Smart City strategy.