Co-creation and Smart Cities: Looking Beyond Technology highlights a more robust value-based perspective on public service development and delivery, helping structure co-creation processes that foster responsible innovation and a systemic, value-based approach to sustainable urban development.

Co-creation and Smart Cities: Looking Beyond Technology highlights a more robust value-based perspective on public service development and delivery, helping structure co-creation processes that foster responsible innovation and a systemic, value-based approach to sustainable urban development.

This book seeks to contribute to prior research facing the discussion about public value creation in Smart Cities and the role of governments. In the early 21st century, the rapid transition to a highly urbanized population has made societies and their governments around the world to be meeting unprecedented challenges regarding key themes such as sustainability, new governance models and the creation of networks. Also, cities today face increasing challenges when it comes to providing advanced (digital) services to their constituency. The use of information and communication technologies (usually ICTs) and data is thought to rationalize and improve government and have the potential to transform governance and organizational issues. These questions link up to the ever-evolving concept of Smart Cities. In fact, the rise of the Smart City and Smart City thinking is a direct response to such challenges, as well as providing a means of integrating fast evolving technology into our living environment. This focus on the public value creation in Smart Cities could be of interest for academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts involved in and responsible for the governance, development and design of Smart Cities

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the various aspects for the development of smart cities from a European perspective. It presents both theoretical concepts as well as empirical studies and cases of smart city programs and their capacity to create value for citizens. The contributions in this book are a result of an increasing interest for this topic, supported by both national governments and international institutions. The book offers a large panorama of the most important aspects of smart cities evolution and implementation. It compares European best practices and analyzes how smart projects and programs in cities could help to improve the quality of life in the urban space and to promote cultural and economic development.

As populations have continued to grow and expand, many people have made their homes in cities around the globe. With this increase in city living, it is becoming vital to create intelligent urban environments that efficiently support this growth and simultaneously provide friendly and progressive environments to both businesses and citizens alike. Smart Cities and Smart Spaces: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is an innovative reference source that discusses social, economic, and environmental issues surrounding the evolution of smart cities. Highlighting a range of topics such as smart destinations, urban planning, and intelligent communities, this multi-volume book is designed for engineers, architects, facility managers, policymakers, academicians, and researchers interested in expanding their knowledge on the emerging trends and topics involving smart cities.

​The original point that differentiates this text from otherwise similar texts is that it looks at the building of smart cities from the viewpoint of an interchange of knowledge among companies in different industries, or “Ba” as shared context in motion, and emphasizes that the resulting value becomes a source of new corporate competitive advantage. In recent years numerous publications have appeared that analyze smart cities from various perspectives including urban planning and administration, network theory, and innovation. However, few are academic texts that approach the subject from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage against a theoretical background in management studies, as this one does. This book is the first full-scale academic work to analyze smart cities from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage. Research into corporate competitive advantage includes the positioning and the resource-based views, with the former focusing on companies’ external environment and the latter on their internal resources. Although these theories’ foci of attention necessarily differ, they both developed as tools for analyzing companies’ relative merits and their chances of succeeding in the marketplace, and they take the common premise that competitive advantage is built through competition among companies. In contrast, this book sees corporate competitive advantage as arising not through competition but through “co-creation” among companies. It differs in its approach from existing theories in thinking that emphasizing co-creation over competition enables an analysis that better describes actual conditions when considering smart cities and corporate competitive advantage. Put another way, when new values arise from attempts to exchange and fuse knowledge, expertise, and other factors at the “ba” where companies from different industries collaborate, these values are surely brought about through co-creation among companies. Another point regarding this book’s original perspective on competitive advantage is its emphasis on the relationship between the creation of social value and competitive advantage. The question of the extent to which socially useful values can be created in the markets of the 21st century is closely linked to corporate competitive advantage. The issues of building smart cities and corporate competitive advantage are themes that this perspective can firmly grasp. This book intends to take up three different projects from among the smart-city building developments taking shape in Japan, and undertake case studies based on the theoretical framework outlined above. The central themes will analyze the mechanism of co-creation among companies and the relationship of created value to competitive advantage. This analysis aims to demonstrate one model relating to corporate competitive advantage in the 21st century.

Globally, Smart Cities initiatives are pursued which reproduce the interests of capital and neoliberal government, rather than wider public good. This book explores smart urbanism and 'the right to the city', examining citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, and co-creation to imagine a different kind of Smart City.