Impact-oriented And Resilient Strategies For Smart Cities

In an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, cities and communities are confronted with both growing, well-known challenges and more uncertain, potentially disruptive future developments. At the same time, smart cities strive to offer their residents an attractive location as well as modern, citizen-centric and sustainable services. In the face of these numerous challenges, city leaders require by all means clear and resilient strategies to help them take the right decisions for their populations. The purpose of this thesis is to identify what is needed for smart cities to develop more resilient strategies that focus on delivering clear benefits for their citizens and stakeholders, while preparing cities for current challenges and an uncertain future. The thesis begins by reviewing the distinctive features and recommendations from the literature on strategic planning in the public sector and continues by assessing to what extent these factors have been addressed in current strategic frameworks for smart cities. Then, the thesis provides practical methods for conducting a preliminary analysis for the development of smart city strategies. In addition, the thesis proposes a novel application of benefits maps to the formulation of impact-oriented strategies that focus on delivering clear benefits to city stakeholders. Furthermore, a scenario-based approach to strategic planning is improved with Fuzzy Cognitive Maps and proposed in the context of smart cities to support the development of more resilient strategies. Finally, the thesis presents the results of an analysis of the latter approach by strategy experts and concludes on its main contributions and limitations in the case of real-world applications.

Supervisors: Moreno Colombo, Edy Portmann

Student: Daniel Pfund

Project status: Finished

Year: 2023

Keywords: Smart City, planning,fuzzy cognitifve maps, decision support tools