A New Perspective on Decision Making and Coordination in Smart City Projects

Abstract

With the use of advanced technologies in smart cities, some particular questions such as which digital tools ought to be used in which projects and which specific areas in smart cities have begun to be further considered. Nevertheless, the projects applied to the smart cities have been carried out in unplanned manners and some resources have been wasted since there is no relevant map that might enable us to determine our path throughout the process unceasingly. Hence, existing technological applications should be strengthened with recent management approaches, and herein a coordination between all stakeholders and city projects should be established. In this article, specific requirements are additionally accentuated and some explicit solutions are decidedly recommended to prevent cities from turning into a ‘technology dump’ in time. In order to achieve the stated aim, a new assessment map has been created through combining the basic approaches applied separately in the projects of the best smart cities ever known in the world, and then this assessment map has been tested in a smart city, Istanbul. As a consequence, it is alleged that using six different approaches, which are all appraised as substantial, in smart city projects up to the hilt and also envisioning them as whole all during evaluations will provide considerable benefits to all stakeholders of cities. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.