Summary conclusions

In all three cases, smart city is crucially related to three types of international dynamics: (1) companies are increasingly seeing cities as potential markets and supporters of their business agendas; (2) cities have reoriented themselves towards entrepreneurial forms of management and governance in relation with the privatization of public services and an increasingly competitive world market since the 1980s; (3) since the financial crisis of 2007/08 the EU has put smart city as a technological driver of growth on its agenda. However, the three case study cities relate differently to these dynamics due to local conditions. Likewise, while all three municipalities engage in specific preferential relations with certain companies in view of smart city, this happens for specific reasons and in different ways. Moreover, the relation to provincial, national and EU policies as well as the relation with international institutions and the world market in terms of smart city varies, too.

Although the case study cities have institutionalized smart city to a certain degree, the character and extent of this institutionalization differ widely.

To summarize our findings, there is no single meaning of smart city, but there are multiple meanings related to this label, which serves different functions depending on local conditions. In no case do municipalities react passively to the strategies pursued by corporations or the visions they promote, as has been suggested by part of the literature on the subject. Rather, municipalities co-produce the smart city both as an imaginary and as material change. Furthermore, intermediate levels of policy-making are important for urban smart city policies. While in Vienna, smart city rather serves to safeguard continuity of long standing social, environmental and locational policy patterns, and shall enhance a certain type of international recognition of its tradition by applying the smart city vocabulary, this very label marks the attempt to radically break from the political past in Barcelona –and was again replaced by a different political terminology by the subsequent government. However, material policies regarding digital technologies and their role in Barcelona remain rather stable as do urban development approaches and in general reproduce long run patterns

199 in the sense of being organized in other countries, too.

in urban development regardless of labeling issues. In Berlin, smart city is discursively constructed as a rather narrow strategy of technology research and development. Neither hit as severely by the financial crisis of 2007/08 as Barcelona nor being in a rather subaltern position within the global hierarchy of cities as Vienna, the benefits of the smart city label in Berlin are limited.

The following Tables 2 and 3 summarize the findings and relate them to the typology of governance arrangements proposed by Arnouts et al. (2012).

Table 2: Summary of stylized findings and governance arrangement types according to the typology of Arnouts et al.

(2012) relating to smart city and digital city in the case study cities.

Table 3: Summary of stylized findings and governance arrangement types according to the typology of Arnouts et al.

(2012) relating to smart city and digital city in the case study cities.

Three types of public governance arrangements of smart city policy-making can be identified.

Vienna corresponds to a closed co-governance type, which is dominated by the administration, but includes several further actors. In Barcelona, policy-making related to digital technologies (which were the material core of smart city under the Trias government in this city) under the current Colau government belongs to the same type. However, the type of actors included is different, since these are social movements and SMEs rather than corporations and big research institutions such as in

Vienna. Berlin corresponds to an open co-governance arrangement, where overall smart city policy-making is governed rather loosely by a more open, flexibly composed and collaborating network of certain groups, basically a constellation of business actors together with research institutions on the one hand and the city executive on the other hand, where particular departments and politicians take a lead. Under the Trias government, smart city policy-making in Barcelona was hierarchically organized. A range of corporations was important for the arrangement, but rather as a contextual condition, not for the policy-making itself, the terms of which were mainly set by the government, and, above all, by the mayor and the deputy mayor.

The content of the governance arrangements related to smart or digital city widely differs in our case study cities. Vienna has an environmental focus with a strong presence of social concerns and a rather secondary role of business interests, while smart city in Berlin has primarily a business and technology oriented focus, with environmental concerns being secondary, together with social issues. In Barcelona under the Trias government, the business and technology focus was even stronger, with citizensʼ convenience as consumers as a secondary goal, while under the Colau government, the newly conceived digital city policy has a strong technology focus, too, but is decisively oriented towards participatory democracy and technological sovereignty, underscoring social aims as the prime driver, although economic concerns do play a role in this view as well.

The socio-economic context varies decisively. While Berlin is the capital of the hegemonial center of the European Union, although its economic and social situation is problematic for German standards, and Vienna is a regional power center and part of the EU center states as well, the context of Barcelona is a semi-peripheral country (in world-systems theoretical terms), and located at the political and economic periphery of the European Union –although it is an economic powerhouse in the context of Spain and has a much more internationalized standing than Vienna, and is possibly also somewhat more internationalized than Berlin economically. Thus, employment policies are much more important in Berlin politically than in Vienna, and they are even more so in Barcelona. Moreover, the housing situation is socially desastrous in Barcelona and very problematic in Berlin, and still shows problematic tendencies such as rising rents in Vienna. Although housing issues are thus highly relevant politically in all three cities, the gravity of the associated problems differs. Moreover, housing challenges are very much associated with (though not reducible to) urban growth in Vienna and Berlin, while urban growth is less an issue in Barcelona.

The governance arrangement in Vienna shows most strongly a multi-level character, connecting levels from the local to the national state and the European Union, but multiple policy-making levels were also visible in Barcelona under the Trias government and still are relevant under the Colau government. In any case, both governments have a strong internationalized outlook, although the first one with an exclusive business focus, while the latter is much more oriented towards the building up of cooperative links and political alliances between cities in the sense of municipalism.

The EU level was and is relevant for smart or digital city policy-making in Barcelona, but was more decisive in Vienna and Berlin, and was more closely related there to the EU SET plan.