Building Transformative Capacity of Smart Cities: Lesson from Stockholm

The City of Stockholm put significant weight in the improvement of their transformative capacity. This is ensured by the implementing measures that support the sustainability of their smart city agenda. For Stockholm, it is not only crucial to have a long-term vision but also that the goal is shared and democratically legitimised by a wide range of stakeholders. Having a common long-term goal become a powerful tool as it helped to create an overarching and shared agenda and collective energy for realisation in practice. Stockholm also ensure that the overarching goal is translated well into other planning and development documents at different strategic level. 

The alignment of goals and objective between different strategic documents are coupled with comprehensive engagement process between the government, citizen, private entities and other related stakeholders. This process creates an ecosystem that support critical learning and reflection and establishes shared accountability. Further, this process creates a regular basis for regular monitoring and evaluation that provides the input for further improvement and ensure the sustainability of the goals. The benefits of these measures lie in their ability to create accountability while engaging stakeholders in a feedback process that strengthens learning and collaboration, which is essential in the Smart City development. This demonstrate that transparency in monitoring and evaluation is seen as an opportunity to facilitate learning between stakeholders and to allow for flexibility and adaptation in planning and implementation processes. 

Reference:

Meyer, S et al. (2021). Enhancing Capacity Building for Urban Transformation as a Means to Close the Planning–Implementation Gap in Europe and China. In Towards Socially Integrative Cities (Vol. 9). MDPI, Basel.

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