Dynamic Capabilities in ‘Smart’ Cities

‘Smart city’ is emerging as both a new concept of urban living and a new urban regeneration strategy. Prompted by the question: “is the city a computer?” we view ‘smart city’ as a distributed network of self-organising and co-evolving individuals, organisations, and stakeholder groups within a distributed network of cities and towns in a connected information era. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to ascertain and characterise the nature and properties of the ‘smart’ infrastructure as a critical business/social resource and the complementarity or contradiction between the ‘smart’ infrastructure and other key resources; to conceptualise how the ‘smart’ infrastructure transforms the endogenous formation and evolution of dynamic capabilities in the ‘smart’ city. Given the special features of the city ecosystem and the concern for equity, we further call for the incorporation of a transformative services dimension into the ‘smart’ city research agenda.