2015•01•14     Ottawa

On 14 January 2015, UNU-EGOV signed a contract with the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian federal Crown corporation that supports research in developing countries to promote growth and development, to conduct research focused on Smart Cities for Sustainable Development.

The research will explore the benefits, challenges and possible routes for Smart City innovation to further Sustainable Development objectives in different development situations, considering the specificity of the local context across political, institutional, socio-economic, cultural and other dimensions. To this end, the research will conduct research and policy literature reviews, conduct interviews with Smart City experts and practitioners particularly from but not limited to developing countries, and develop and analyse a set of cases of Smarty City innovations being employed in different development situations. Besides assessing the state-of-the-art and state-of-practice in the field, the research is expected to produce a set of policy alternatives and related research questions to inform policy decisions depending on the local needs and circumstances.

The project was developed and is being led by Elsa Estevez, Senior Academic Programme Officer at UNU-EGOV, supported by Nuno Vasco Lopes, a postdoctoral fellow from Portugal recruited for this project, and Tomasz Janowski, the Head of UNU-EGOV.