Institutionalization of the Smart City Concept in Hungary

Abstract

The concept of the so-called smart city has been approached in many different ways. One of the most prominent contemporary researchers on smart cities, Boyd Cohen, in a 2015 article entitled ‘The 3 Generations of Smart Cities’, distinguished three phases of smart city projects and initiatives. The service-driven Smart City Phase 1.0 primarily linked to the market penetration efforts of large multinational corporations, the progressive city leader-driven Smart City Phase 2.0 and the Smart City Phase 3.0, now seen as the result of citizen collaboration. What is left out of such an approach is the place and role of higher level development policies in the conceptualization and institutionalization of the smart city. This is particularly true in the case of a Central and Eastern European country like Hungary, which is inherently characterized by a centralized (unitary) territorial system and where, due to its semi-peripheral location, smart city innovations are not the result of organic, autochthonous processes. Taking all this into account, the study, using the methodological tool of discourse analysis, seeks to answer the question of how the smart city concept at EU and/or national level, which is constantly changing according to the rules of the smart city discourse, is reflected in the local (municipal) level of urban development. To answer this question, I will empirically examine the relevant legal sources and other documents of the development policies of the European Union and Hungarian government level, as well as the development documents of Hungarian municipalities that have apparently recognized the need to move towards the smart city and have tried to make their tasks explicit by means of urban development documents that refer to the smart city concept in their title.