The Operationalizing Aspects of Smart Cities: the Case of Turkey’s Smart Strategies

Recent efforts to design conceptual maps and models that best outline the definition, typologies, and dimensions of cities that use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for greater advancement have focused on the term “smart city.” To approach this subject beyond a strategical level only, this paper focused on the operationalizing aspects of becoming smarter in order to identify the weaknesses, contradictions, and limitations of smart city projects and action plans prescribed by the policy reports in order to understand how smart city projects work in reality. This paper utilized the case study of Turkey’s initiative beginning in the 2000s of transitioning into an information society as well as its smart city initiatives beginning in the 2010s. The process contains ever changing dynamics that create, transform, and design new reconfigurations in complex socio-technical platforms. By examining diverse local institutional design, context, and differential aspects of smart solution experiences, this paper identified the processes of achieving smart projects by comparing smart city policy reports in order to create a roadmap for other related nationwide projects. Smart projects create policy areas performed by various and multi-dimensional socio-technical reconfigurations which emerge and interact to create and institutionalize new urban solutions. Analyzing the process of becoming smarter reveals three elements of smart city projects: infrastructural dimensions (legal basis, technology, and the coordination between institutions); policy areas and scope; as well as critical performance indicators to evaluate the success and progress of smart city projects. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.