What are the Challenges of Building a Smart City?

The recent emergence of the concept of 'smart cities' presents challenges to city administrators for planning, managing, and governing modern cities in the digital age. Research on smart cities has tended to focus on the attributes of cities at a more developed stage. Instead, this article departs from that trend by discussing an aspiring smart city in a small-island developing country. The purpose of the study is to examine the steps required for building a smart city against a background of the concept of smart cities, taken in the context of an empirical study of an aspiring small smart city. The main finding is that there is no single route to becoming a smart city, but rather there are critical steps that can be adopted as part of a building process for achieving that objective. This work adds value in presenting a way to synthesize the smart city concept with empirical work involving one small smart city's aspirations and achievements. The article fills a partial gap in the smart city literature and has implications for aspiring city administrators, smart city builders, persons concerned with the application of ICT to address city challenges, as well as for students of urban planning, development, and management.