Smart cities as a platform for technological and social innovation in productivity, sustainability, and livability: A conceptual framework

Despite a great deal of attention paid to smart cities, the conceptual framework for understanding them has been partial at best. This chapter establishes a holistic framework to define and evaluate smart cities through three core objectives that any city wants to improve—productivity, sustainability, and livability. Although smartness includes a wide range of aspects within a city, it should tackle the complexity of urban challenges internally and externally generated. Thus, adaptive capacity is becoming more and more important, requiring timely innovation. The chapter asserts cities are and should be a platform for technological and social innovation to enhance these three urban cores. Creating smart cities via innovation is not a one-way process, but reciprocal. Innovation can create smart built environments, and, in turn, smart cities engender innovation. There are many successful evidences and documented examples of both technology-oriented initiatives and social innovation strategies worldwide. However, there is limited understanding of the combined view on technological innovation or social innovation that can contribute to meeting urban challenges. Furthermore, how the urban future might benefit from interdependency and interactions of the elements in these two concepts has not been fully explored. The research will set an agenda for measurement of cities’ performance in productivity, sustainability, and livability from both technological and social innovation perspectives.