In 2016 more than half of the world’s population lived in urban areas and this is projected to rise to 60% by 2030 (United Nations, 2016). Cities are centres of innovation and creativity, but they also face great challenges from rapid urbanisation including demand for natural resources, impacts of climate change, increasing demand for city services such as transport, health and social care and issues around social cohesion (Braun et al., 2007; Cohen, 2006). Smart cities is a widely used concept that seeks to address such urban challenges, but there is no agreed definition of what a smart city is. What many definitions have in common is they consider the use of technology to improve the efficiency of city services by reducing costs and resource consumption and to address societal challenges by improving collaboration between citizens and government (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011; Börjesson Rivera et al., 2015; Chourabi et al., 2012; Hollands, 2008; Nam and Pardo, 2011; Van Waart et al., 2015).
Multi-stakeholder collaboration is seen as central to smart city development but the city stakeholders involved (local government, research organisations, technology providers, community organisations, citizens etc.) often have conflicting values and interests (Angelidou, 2014; Van Waart et al., 2015). Whilst the smart cities literature identifies smart governance as a key element of smart cities, there is little research exploring how leadership is being exercised within smart cities (Chourabi et al., 2012; Lombardi et al., 2012; Nicholds et al., 2017).
The aim of this paper is to explore place leadership and followership in smart city initiatives that have been developed in Amsterdam, Bristol, Chicago, Curitiba, Melbourne and Milton Keynes. This paper is based on a partnership between a practitioner working on several smart city projects as consultant/academic and an academic (mode 2 research). Data have been gathered from several secondary sources: through documental analysis of relevant academic literature, city policy documents and promotional materials and from the re-analysis and interpretation of data sets from smart city studies that involved one of the authors including a study of comments posted by international learners on a Massive Open Online Course on Smart Cities (Gooch et al., 2017) .
Our research will fill a gap in the literature by explicitly focusing on the leadership and followership within smart cities and it will contribute to improve practice and policy by shedding more light on what are the key actors, structures, processes and followership patterns in smart cities to co-create public value (Bryson et al., 2017). Specifically, drawing from Budd & Sancino (2016), Hambleton and Howard (2013) and Hartley (2002), we will examine how smart city leadership and followership is exercised across four main domains of place leadership: Political leadership, Public services professional leadership, Community leadership, and Business leadership.
Smart_City_Leadership_IRSPM_2018.pdf 