Creating Smart-er Cities

• the freedom to develop polices, with the leadership and strategies capable of reaching beyond the idea of "creative slack";
• a process of reinvention, whereby cities become "smarter," in using intellectual capital to not only meet the efficiency requirements of wealth creation, but to become centres of creative slack;
• the political leadership capable of not only being economically innovative, or culturally creative, but enterprising in opening-up, reflexively absorbing and discursively shaping the democratic governance of such developments;
• the democratic governance to sustain such developments.

Drawing together the critical insights from papers from a collection of leading international experts on the transition to smart cities, this book proposes to do what has recently been asked of those responsible for creating Smarter Cities. That is: provide the definitional components, critical insights and institutional means by which to get beyond the all too often self-congratulatory tone cities across the world strike when claiming to be smart and by focussing on the critical role master-plans and design codes play in supporting the sustainable development of communities.

This book was published as a special issue of Urban Technology.