Constructing a Model for Smart City Strategy Building in Latin American Cities

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Latin America is currently the most urbanised global region, with >80% of its population living in cities (World Bank, 2020). Latin American cities tend to face problems in governance, competitiveness, congestion, sprawl, and crime, (Calderon et al, 2018), made more acute by their highly urbanised circumstances. As city governance moves towards greater use of technology, big data and internet-based tools, coherent and accountable strategic planning of interventions can represent an integrated approach to respond to the specific circumstances of Latin American cities and encourage citizenempowerment. Smart City measures (including ICT-based solutions), have the potential to greatly improve economic, environmental and social performance (Caragliu et al, 2011), when co-ordinated successfully. Existing Smart City frameworks and strategies tend to have been developed in the context of the Global North, and therefore often assume different baseline positions than may be appropriate for Latin American cities. This baseline can lead to strategy recommendations of advanced measures, which require significant investment first in infrastructure and skills. Misaligned strategies may also prioritise aspects which are already strengths of Latin American cities, e.g. citizen engagement platforms or certain environmental interventions (de Halleux & Estache, 2018), and so limited funds may be used inefficiently. A gap in integrated and long-term strategy building and governance has been identified as a key barrier to Smart City implementation, both in developing countries generally (Tan & Taeihagh, 2020), and in Latin America specifically (Marchetti et al., 2019). Successful initiatives rely on comprehensive long term coordination, which can allow for consistent progress towards strategic goals, attraction of capital, social empowerment, and improved delivery of services (Lee et al., 2014). This is not to say that there have been no successful Smart City interventions in Latin America. Several examples of initiatives and strategies can be observed, from which lessons can be learned and applied to other cities with similar problems. For example, the Rio Operations Centre is a much discussed large-scale urban monitoring/data gathering centre (Pereira et al., 2016), Medellin has been implementing Smart City/Digital policies since 2007 (Useche et al., 2013), and other cities such as Curitiba have enacted smart measures whilst pursuing other environmental goals (Macke et al, 2018).A coherent strategy-based approach towards Smart City implementation would aid in the acceleration of development and quality of life in Latin American cities, and in achieving and monitoring broader environmental objectives. Good Smart City strategy building tools should incorporate lessons learned bi-directionally from strengths of both Latin America and the Global North. A good example of the required consideration and divergence in smart city measure governance/implementation by region is shown by the ASCIMER initiative, which identified differing strengths and "challenges" to smart city development, for cities in the south and east Mediterranean (North Africa and the Near East), compared to the more developed northern Mediterranean (Europe) (ASCIMER, 2017). Research would contribute knowledge to understand the key impediments and resources which Latin American cities have in this area, and the creation of a framework/integrated strategy would anchor this knowledge through actionable means to answer how these issues can be addressed in a comprehensive, equitable, long-term manner.