Extracting the main characteristics of a city to be smart

Despite there are too many different viewpoints and definitions of the “Smart City” notion, the management part of a particular city needs to formulate a special definition of this concept for the city, based on its specific characteristics and priorities. The main question of this research is "What are the general characteristics of the smart city concept, and how we can derive customized characteristics for a particular city using these general characteristics"? This paper provides an approach to determine a set of validated, customized and prioritized characteristics for the target city. These characteristics can be used for formulating a desired definition for the city. In addition, they can serve as an input for strategic planning of the city and a criterion for prioritizing the urban projects for the target city. The first phase of our approach is based on a systematic review on the literature in order to take a valid range of different characteristics of the smart city notion. The second phase relies on the characteristics resulted in the first phase and determines a set of particular characteristics for the target city, based on its upstream documents and stakeholders’ opinions. In order to illustrate the second phase as well as showing the usability of our approach, we applied this approach to Tehran, the capital of I.R. Iran. Our study resulted in 35 common characteristics which are candidate for all cities. Then, 10 main characteristics were particularly extracted for the future Smart Tehran. These characteristics were used to derive the mission, vision, and values of Smart Tehran, as well as prioritizing the six main components of smart cities for this city in the following order: smart economy; smart mobility; smart living; smart governance; smart people; smart environment.