How Local Policy Priorities Set the Smart City Agenda

The smart city concept has emerged as a key subject pursued by local governments. Yet, it is not clear how policymakers narrow down the topics to focus on with respect to their smart city agenda. As a result, the aim of this paper is to propose a theoretical contribution that explains how local governments define their smart city policy agenda. It is suggested that the agenda is influenced by policy priorities at the local level from other urban domains. To support this notion, policy studies literature is used to show that three streams of problems, policy, and politics, when aligned, set the policy agenda. The smart city agenda will be formed from key ideas existing at the local political level, such as policy priorities, that have now been matched with solutions framed in the smart city context, all underpinned by a favourable political environment. In addition, from smart city policy related documents, a topic modelling analysis illustrates a set of topics that are associated to the smart city policy agenda in two cities, London and Melbourne. This shows how some topics on the smart city agenda can be likened to issues that are the primary topic of another policy domain.