| Abstract |
Smart cities promise to employ advanced digital technologies and data analytics to revolutionize the ways hundreds of thousands of people live in and interact with the city. As such, the journey toward building a smart city is considered a major socio-technical transformation with wide policy implications. Despite this, an increasing number of cities around the world are embarking on this journey, but are facing numerous organizational, societal, political, and technological challenges. This study 1 describes the critical first phase of Dubai's mega-transformation into a "smart" city. The city's officially stated vision is to become the "smartest" city in the world by 2017, merely three years after the launch of the project. According to the city's vision, this does not only mean making the city more responsive, efficient, and environmentally sustainable, but at the core of this ambitious goal is transforming the city to one of the "happiest" places on earth to live and work. The "Smart Dubai Office" is the entity mandated with driving the city's transformation in partnership with numerous government and private sector partners. During the first phase of Dubai's smart city initiative, these stakeholders realized that achieving such ambitious goals requires tackling multifaceted challenges. This case study illustrates these challenges from the stakeholders' perspective. It also describes the milestones reached during the critical first phase of Dubai's stride toward building the smart city and documents the multifaceted complexities and policy responses during this journey. |