Smart City Development In Practice Governance, Organizational Design And Strategic Trajectories In Medium-Sized And Central European Cities [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

This dissertation asks how cities become smart in practice, with particular attention to medium-sized and Central and Eastern European cities. Its starting point is that smartness is not a technological condition but a context-dependent, governance-mediated process of urban development, in which structural barriers, strategic orientation, organizational design, the implemented activity portfolio and the stakeholder network jointly determine what kind of public value urban digitalization is able to produce. The article-based thesis integrates five studies produced between 2018 and 2026 into a single explanatory framework. The first study adapts Porter’s Five Forces framework to smart city research and, drawing on two focus groups with fifteen participants, identifies the principal constraints facing Hungarian medium-sized cities: knowledge deficits, weak data availability and quality, the absence of standards, biased assessment practices, and dependence on large external suppliers. The second study systematizes the public, private, professional and generic organizational barriers of urban digitalization, and develops and validates SmartCEPS, a collaborative, open-innovation platform model designed to address them. The third study codes 637 smart city activities across nine cities against nine value-proposition components and shows, through cluster analysis, that cities embed markedly different benefit structures — environmental efficiency, quality of life, citizen engagement, social inclusion — in their portfolios. The fourth study diagnoses Budapest’s smart city strategy through 111 development activities and 337 participating organizations along four strategic dichotomies. The fifth study analyses 120 initiatives and a collaboration network of 161 organizations in Debrecen, extending strategic diagnosis with stakeholder-network analysis. The integrated findings show that smart city development in both Hungarian cases is predominantly technology-led, strongly top-down and largely double-helix in collaboration, while the project portfolio nevertheless spans multiple urban domains. The central theoretical contribution follows from this: portfolio integration and governance inclusiveness are analytically distinct dimensions. A city may be broad and coherent in what it does while remaining selective in who shapes, steers and benefits from that activity. The dissertation further repositions the medium-sized city as an analytical setting in its own right, identifies organizational design as the mediating mechanism between smart city ambition and implementation, and brings the relational structure of stakeholder networks into the explanatory model of smart city governance.