Smart City appropriation by local actors: An instrument in the making

© 2019 The literature on Smart Cities lacks of research on how actors understand and appropriate the Smart City. This paper questions in an innovative way their appropriations of the phenomenon. Smart City is considered as an instrument, following the theory of Lascoumes and Le Galès (2007). Is the Smart City a functional instrument: a kind of evidence and a pragmatic solution at disposal or a public policy instrument: not neutral, provoking debates and influencing policies? An empirical analysis is carried on based on a survey among 193 Belgian actors active in the domain. The results show that the Instrument theory is relevant to analyse the actors' appropriation, which do not follow a homogeneous trend. In fact, each actor follows his own logics which will be interesting to study.

Publication year:2019