The aim of this project is to investigate how Smart City is travelling from one city to another, focusing on the process where a city is adopting strategies and initiatives from another city. This project argues, on the behalf of Tait and Jensens (2007) theory “Travelling Ideas”, how this process is quit challenging, causing problems for the adoption process, whenever a macro actor – such as local governance, society or spatial dimensions, is translated from one city to another. This complex process causes challenges because the local context, spatial relationships and conditions will not be similar between the two cities, since these are localized and place determined. Cities cannot simply copy good practices on Smart City governance, but needs to develop approaches that fit their own situation. Based on this, the project focuses first on why a city should focus on using Smart City as a vision for development, and next how the city should approach the use of Smart City and create strategies.
The Smart City has a shared vision and adaptive use of social governance and citizen participation, which is highlighted as just as important as the technologic dimension. The technologic dimension should act only as a tool, solving the myriad problems the city faces and the needs to which the institutions and citizen’s demands. Political involvement and attention is important to increase, since they are the forces that can embed Smart City development in democratic institutions, while the public value has a consumer approach, thus it is the needs and wants of the collective citizens that is important when evaluating which technologic actors should be implemented in the city. Despite this, practitioners using the Smart City vision has a tendency to narrow all focus only on the technological dimension, only relying on the possibilities these actors possess, and thereby forgetting that it is the citizens and institutions that should act as decision makers, and that the technological dimension should only act as a tool. Because of this, the project seeks to determine how a city – based on a Danish case, where Smart City is used as a vision for a cooperated project between 10 municipalities in Copenhagen – can use Smart City and the three dimensional aspect that creates the smarter city in a way, where the planning process and strategies focuses on all three dimensions instead of just the one, technical dimension.