Summary of the article titled Beyond defining the smart city – Meeting top-down and bottom-up approaches in the middle from 2014 by Jonas Breuer, Nils Walravens, and Pieter Ballon, presented at the Eight International Conference INPUT 2014 titled Smart City – Planning for Energy, Transportation and Sustainability, and published in the Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment. 
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see an investigation into the bottom-up and top-down smart city approaches and where they can meet. This article introduces what smart city can mean for the different stakeholders and the consequences of its interpretation.
You can find the article through this link.
Abstract: This paper aims to better frame the discussion and the various, divergent operationalisations and interpretations of the Smart City concept. We start by explicating top-down approaches to the Smart City, followed by what purely bottom-up initiatives can look like. We provide a clear overview of stakeholders’ different viewpoints on the city of tomorrow. Particularly the consequences and potential impacts of these differing interpretations and approaches should be of specific interest to researchers, policy makers, city administrations, private actors and anyone involved and concerned with life in cities. Therefore the goal of this article is not so much answering the question of what the Smart City is, but rather what the concept can mean for different stakeholders as well as the consequences of their interpretation. We do this by assembling an eclectic overview, bringing together definitions, examples and operationalisations from academia, policy and industry as well as identifying major trends and approaches to realizing the Smart City. We add to the debate by proposing a different approach that starts from the collective, collaboration and context when researching Smart City initiatives.
You can find the transcript through this link.
Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

No.046 - Analysis and comparison of Smart City initiatives, talking about Living Labs

What wast the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you?
Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the shownotes are also available.
I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in.
Music by Lesfm from Pixabay