Are you interested in smart cities as a functional instrument to influence public debate and policy? 
Our summary today works with the article titled Smart City appropriation by local actors: An instrument in the making from 2019 by Jonathan Desdemoustier, Nathalie Crutzen, Mario Cools, and Jacques Teller, published in the Cities journal. 
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how the different urban actors understand and appropriate the smart city concept. This article presents that smart city, indeed, can be an instrument and that each actor follows their own logic.
As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

The smart city emerged as a new way of imagining, organising, and managing the city and its flows.
The smart city can be considered an instrument that could be appropriated by actors as either a functionalist instrument or as a public policy instrument.
Urban actors – politicians, public servants, private actors, members of the civil society and researchers – appropriate the smart city through both types of instruments without a homogenous view, which means that smart city approaches need clarity when established.

You can find the article through this link.
Abstract: The literature on Smart Cities lacks of research on how actors understand and appropriate the Smart City. This paper questions in an innovative way their appropriations of the phenomenon. Smart City is considered as an instrument, following the theory of Lascoumes and Le Galès (2007). Is the Smart City a functional instrument: a kind of evidence and a pragmatic solution at disposal or a public policy instrument: not neutral, provoking debates and influencing policies? An empirical analysis is carried on based on a survey among 193 Belgian actors active in the domain. The results show that the Instrument theory is relevant to analyse the actors' appropriation, which do not follow a homogeneous trend. In fact, each actor follows his own logics which will be interesting to study.
Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

No.082R - Beyond defining the smart city;
No.091R - The political premises of contemporary urban concepts;

You can find the transcript through this link.
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