What Makes a City Smart? Lessons from Barcelona

Innovation, and technological innovation in particular, can help city governments to meet the challenges of urban governance, to improve urban environments, to become more competitive and to address sustainability concerns. To prevent and manage these challenges, cities need to operate in an innovative way. In this context, the smart city approach is emerging as a way of solving tangled and wicked problems. However, there is no one route to becoming smart and different cities have adopted different approaches that reflect their particular circumstances. The objective of this paper is to assess the strategy adopted by the city of Barcelona, which has been repeatedly considered among the top smart cities in the world, using a comprehensive framework that includes eight variables for the analysis. The ultimate goal is to provide useful insights on the development of a smart city.