Background

Global and local trends show that investments into smart city or urban digitalisation projects will continue to grow.

The projected growth in urban digitalisation initiatives presents opportunities for economic growth, and creating an enabling environment for data-informed decision making to create public value. National and local governments around the world are increasingly coalescing around the vision that increased deployment of sensors, city dashboards, and data capture and analytics technologies hold the key to making improved decisions that are based on near ‘real-time’ insights about citizens, and the natural and built environments.

However, the competencies (i.e., repertoire of knowledge and abilities) needed by the key implementers (local governments and their smart city delivery partners) significantly fall short and the need to address this gap is critical. 

These gaps have been indicated in various international and national reports and policy papers published by multilateral organisations, governments and professional bodies, all of which emphasize:

• Multidisciplinary competency gaps existing among local authorities, which need to be addressed to facilitate the creation of liveable smart cities
• The need to address professional and organisational capacity gaps in relation to digital transformation within local governments and their digital innovation supplier networks through structured education.
• A lack of comprehensive understanding of the interconnected dimensions of digitalisation initiatives (e.g., between digital technologies and changes in urban governance) and their far-reaching implications for creating an inclusive society – both shortcomings of smart city projects.

Achieving goals that are attached to smart city projects (e.g., thinking urban transport provision to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality) and delivering value from these investments requires local authorities and their supplier network of built environment professionals to possess the requisite competencies to effectively plan, test, embed and enable digital innovation projects in a way that delivers public value and leads to improved societal outcomes. Furthermore, realising the desired outcomes also requires approaching smart cities projects not merely as a largely technical undertaking (e.g., involving the development and installation of data capturing sensors and technologies), but also with a strong understanding of the interrelatedness with city governance and management, and ethical and responsible innovation aspects.