The Impact of Cultural Aspects on Building the Smart City Approach: Managing Diversity in Europe (London), North America (New York) and Asia (Singapore)

Abstract

One of the main motives for creating this article was to explore the importance of cultural aspects in building smart city approaches. The aim of this article was to obtain answers to three research questions, the answers to which made it possible to identify the elements of multiculturalism that affect the development of smart cities, to find out how multiculturalism affects smart cities and how to manage diversity. The ambition was to create and organize the most important findings into a comprehensive framework. To achieve this goal, secondary analysis methods were used by examining the literature and case studies of best practices from Europe, North America, and Asia. The choice of case studies was conditioned by the placement of smart cities in four global indices (smart city index, Arcadis, IESE and global power index), the existence of a multicultural strategy and elements of successful diversity management, including positive effects and possible limitations. In addition, methods of analysis, comparison and summarization were used. Effective diversity management acts as an accelerator of the sustainable development of smart cities. The results of the analysis of the case studies serve as a basis for recommendations and the creation of a proposed general model, whose task is to simplify the adoption of intelligent concepts, which creates space for the specification of local or cultural conditions of the country. Testing the model in practice is the subject of the following research activities of the authors.