Transplanting good practices in smart city development to Iranian cities; Drawing lessons from Ningbo (China) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands)

Transplanting good practices in smart city development to Iranian cities; Drawing lessons from Ningbo (China) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands) Smart city development is not only popular in many cities in established economies,... [ view full abstract ]

Transplanting good practices in smart city development to Iranian cities; Drawing lessons from Ningbo (China) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands)

Smart city development is not only popular in many cities in established economies, but also among municipal governments in countries that have until quite recently been rather closed off from the outside world. One of these countries with a strong drive to engage in urban (re)development through enhancing its 'smartness' is Iran. Five key cities and one free zone in Iran have been accepted by their national Ministry of Science & Technology as pioneers in this field are capital city Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Uremia, Mashad (as cities) and Kish island (as free zone). All six have all begun to venture into making descriptions of what type of smart city practices they would like to engage in. However, their description lack sophistication and beg conceptual and managerial clarification. As Tehran's mayor summarises the situation: "Our Smart City program is embarrassing." He compared Iran's plans with those of other countries and found that successful cases in this area tend to provide a clear horizon for their implementation. They offer systematic porgrammes bringing various aspects of smart city development (technological requirements, economic potential, cultural specificity, urban planning needs) together into sets of cohesive activities. He claimed no such things had occurred among the Iranian cities thus far.

Iran is therefore in need of planning policies that allow for integrated cross-sectoral approaches bringing high quality infrastructures for information technology and urban planning and services together. This has led policy-makers in Iran to start looking out for promising examples (good or even 'best' practices) abroad, such as in Europe and Asia. However, transplanting policy ideas, action programmes and legal frameworks does not allow for turn-key solutions or ready-made transfers. Adoption of foreign lessons is not something automatic, as theory development in the fields of lesson-drawing, policy transfer, institutional transplantation and policy translation have made clear. It is riddled with process complications and institutional adaptations .

In this contribution, the authors will first introduce the problematique of smart city development (chapter 1), introduce their view and application of lesson-drawing theory to smart city development in Iran (chapter 2), examine and clarify the expressed needs and institutional context of the 5+1 Iranian smart cities (chapter 3), examine two examples of good, yet very different practices in smart city development (Ningbo and Amsterdam) (chapter 4) and apply the lesson-drawing ex ante to the transplantation of suitable policy solutions to the Iranian cities (chapter 5). They will conclude with an analysis how the translation of Ningbo and Amsterdam approaches to smart city development will unleash fundamentally different drivers among Iranian cities and quite likely generate very different smart city solutions among them.