The push to promote the smart city: Assessing the impacts of a government-led Smart City Challenge

Abstract

Cities worldwide continue to experiment with urban technology solutions to address urban problems. Smart city projects have recently emerged in North America, including Canada, but their governance implications on cities and communities remains not fully understood. This article is based on a post-hoc analysis of a pan-Canadian government-driven technology and innovation competition called the Smart Cities Challenge (SCC). The research explored the impact of the SCC across three areas: (1) municipal innovation and governance, (2) collaboration among public, private, and community networks, and (3) policy implementation within local government structures. The findings indicate that public smart city competitions do succeed in fostering strategic planning and community engagement in municipal governments, however local governments struggle to advance technology-oriented projects to the implementation stage without greater investment. For those that did, sustaining successes without further investment and capacity building. The study’s key contribution lies in revealing how the competition stimulated new governance processes, strategic planning efforts, and collaborative networks, while also exposing significant implementation challenges rooted in fiscal constraints, limited technical capacity, and the short-lived nature of competition-based incentives. The research highlights the promise and limits of government-led smart city competitions as tools for advancing municipal innovation in today’s constrained fiscal context.