Smart Financing for Smart Cities Initiatives: Insights from Rio de Janeiro's Public Private Partnership Processes

Investing in technology innovation to make a smart city is costly and risky, and the inefficiency and lack of resources from the public sector are hurdles in this sort of investments. However, raising funds through public... [ view full abstract ]

Investing in technology innovation to make a smart city is costly and risky, and the inefficiency and lack of resources from the public sector are hurdles in this sort of investments. However, raising funds through public private partnership (PPP) can be a viable opportunity, if not the only one, and it seems to be a tempting solution to overcome the lack of infrastructure and investments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provided by the public sector. Against this backdrop, this research attempts to provide insights from PPPs and the promotion of smart city initiatives in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Through a case study methodology, it analyzes the PPP PROPAR-RIO (a municipal program for public private partnerships in rio de Janeiro City), a PPP used in the process of smart city in Rio de Janeiro for the creation of COR (the municipal operations Center) which uses real time analytics providing information regarding traffic, public transport, weather, energy services, among other administrative public services. Though this is an important tool to manage the city and has innovated in many fronts presented in this article, it also suggests that in the case of Rio de Janeiro, the local government failed to promote and enhance the quality of life, creating nothing but a ‘holographic’ city that displays images to seduce tourists and investors while the embedded problems remain unaddressed.