Smartphone, startup, laboratory - What ambitions and visions do local government officials express by their smart city stories? Case study of Polish cities

Abstract

The article is based on empirical research and presents a typology of five narratives in which the ‘smart city’ label is showed as metaphors: “smartphone”, “startup”, “laboratory”, “organism” and “agora”. The research covers the examples of three Polish cities: Gdansk, Warsaw and Wroclaw. We checked how this concept is explained and narrowed down to the framework of the city's strategy and legitimized by city makers. Each of the stories expounds the vision of the city, ways of achieving goals and the approach to residents as users. That might give weight to the nuanced idea and translate into the real urban policy.The conclusions of the study suggest that the smart city concept does not fundamentally change urban policies, but is rather inscribed in the adopted directions and vision, e.g. the city which was wanted to be perceived as academic, identifies “smart” with cooperation with the science sector etc. The results also show that smaller cities that use new technologies more modestly must look for other ways to refer to smart cities for strategic purposes.The empirical basis was the implementation of individual in-depth interviews with city officials, which was supplemented by an analysis of planning, strategic and reporting documents.