Challenges with smart cities initiatives - A municipal decision makers' perspective

The European Nations foresee a growing population and a trending urbanization that pose significant environmental and social concerns. To manage these concerns municipal decision makers’ attempt to leverage the smart city concept with collaboration between external actors as a means to maintain the prepossessed living standard in the city. By developing a framework based on existing literature and validating it with municipal decision makers view on the framework, this paper attempts to further the discussion on the predominant challenges in smart city initiatives from the municipal decision makers’ perspective in mid-sized European cities. The study is based on a pre-study conducted via 39 interviews in 25 different EU-cities. This followed by interviews with 12 decision makers’ in 10 different cities. The results show that municipal decision makers mainly perceive challenges with nontechnical issues such as collaboration, economical, governance and awareness of technology – however security is not perceived as a challenge.