Municipalities’ understanding and importance of the concept of Smart Cities: an exploratory analysis in Belgium

Even if an increasing number of scientific publications are dealing with it, the concept of “smart city” is not yet well defined and it is not fully understood (Anthopoulos and Vakali 2012; Caragliu,Bo, and Nijkamp 2009; Lazaroiu and Roscia 2012). Due to the lack of a proper conceptualization, defined method or credentials for smart cities (Angelidou 2015; Nam and Pardo 2011), cities across the geographical spectrum claim themselves 'smart' with self-congratulatory note (Hollands 2008). Despite this increasing popularity of smart cities, there are few critical discourse and rigorous analytical or statistical analyses of the concept and its application on urban territories (Caragliu, Bo, and Nijkamp 2009; R G Hollands 2015; Kitchin 2015; Vanolo 2014). This paper aims at understanding where Belgian municipalities stand in the field of smart city in 2016. How Belgian municipalities approach the phenomenon smart city? Which focus in smart city -sustainable, technologic, creative and human-do attract Belgian municipalities? The paper answers to these questions thanks to a comprehensive territorial analysis of the country, a presentation of current trends on smart cities in the three Belgian regions, and the construction of a typology of municipalities’ understandings of the phenomenon. It also analyses how these understandings impact priorities and smart city developments of Belgian municipalities. It investigates how they affect municipal priorities in the six dimensions of the smart city and their state of development in some key smart city fields. Finally, it examines how do this typology is related to the municipal perception of difficulty to set up smart city projects and the relevance of the concept for their territories.
The data used comes from the results of a quantitative research amongst Belgian municipalities carried out in 2016 by the Smart City Institute. The research points out key statistical observations around the smart city phenomenon in Belgium. A typology with four different understandings (technological, holistic, specialized and inexistent) emerged from the analyses.