The smart city concept is not new – still decision makers try to „smarten up” Polish cities. What conditions must be met by policies and concrete actions in order for them to be labelled «smart» and what distinguishes them from solutions that are merely «technological gadgets, trinkets»?
Małgorzata Osowska, a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Warsaw and an expert at the Educational Research Institute, talks about examples of smart city implementation in three Polish cities – Gdańsk, Warsaw and Wrocław – and the results of her own research, answering Dr. Justyna Pokojska’s questions about:
- a practical definition of a smart city,
- expert’s findings – which city has proven to be the smartest,
- ways of measuring urban intelligence,
- the ways in which smart city policies are implemented in the surveyed cities and how they talk about the concept,
- differences between talking about the smart city concept and its implementation, Does the fact that policy makers talk about implementation mean that they actually act?
- factors that determine the success of smart cities policies and their implementation,
- the role played by people and managers in the implementation of the smart city – are the barriers to smart (as in the case of digitisation, for example) mainly in people?
