How to Become a Smart City: Learning from Amsterdam

Abstract

This exploratory study has been carried out to better understand the development process of strategies that allow large European cities to become smart. This aim is achieved through the analysis of the Amsterdam's smart city strategy. By using case study research with a descriptive approach, the activities undertaken during the implementation of this successful initiative have been mapped and organized in a step-by-step roadmap. This made it possible to obtain a detailed description of the entire development process, useful knowledge to consider for other similar initiatives, and a conceptual framework for future comparative research. All these results will support the construction of a holistic and empirically valid theory able to explain how to build effective smart city strategies in this type of urban area.

(Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona

“…Hence, (smart) citizenship appears to be at stake. In response, European smart cities such as Barcelona [122] and Amsterdam [123] (Barcelona's partner city in EU project Decode) are leading an alternative movement by following experimental city policy framework practices that rely on democratic data ownership regimes establishing municipal data offices, grassroots innovation, and co-operative service provision models [29,[63][64][65]124,125]. These cities are implementing pervasive transitions to cope with the disruption to the technopolitics of data, and address concerns that include privacy, literacy, awareness, and ownership issues while empowering local communities to avoid the side effects of the predatory sharing economy and extractive practices [2,126].…”

“…BITS, 'Barcelona Initiative for Technological Sovereignty', will be in your interest" [35] (p. 1). Likewise, in Amsterdam, those advocating for smart citizens suggest that (smart) citizens should be guided by the following principles [78,84,121,123]: take responsibility for the environment they live and work in, and the places they like; value access over ownership and involvement over power; ask for tolerance, not authorization; ethical algorithms rather than extractive algorithms; and offer assistance to less technologically savvy individuals. This set of ethics underlies the notion of a still-limited consideration of the interconnections between hard and soft smart infrastructures, as well as those between political, institutional, economic, and social systems on the metropolitan and regional scales.…”

How to evaluate an Internet of Things system: Models, case studies, and real developments

“…Interesting is the works proposed by Bolici and Mora, where a roadmap is proposed as a first step toward establishing a common and empirically valid theory for developing smart city strategies in a urban area. The target cities considered in that case are Barcelona and Amsterdam, and the envisioned strategies mainly regard organizational and financial aspects (ie, not so focused to technological aspects), which are out of the scope of this paper.…”

Analysis of Public Complaints to Identify Priority Policy Areas: Evidence from a Satellite City around Seoul

“…Previous studies have been investigated with the top-down approach by use of big data from national governments and also have been identified with the relevant issues in specific areas of urban policy such as transportation, public safety, and sustainability [10,20,26,27]. However, few studies have emphasized the general applicability of civil complaint data to inform urban policies [24,33]. In particular, there are limited efforts to reap the benefits of civil complaint data for urban policy making, although such work would be key in developing real-world applications.…”