Executive summary This project, undertaken within the activities of the Bouygues-HEC Paris Chair held by Bertrand Quélin (Bouygues Chair Professor in Smart City and the Common Good and Professor of Strategic Management at HEC Paris), identifies and analyzes six leading smart cities located acrossthe globe: Amsterdam (Netherlands), Barcelona (Spain), Copenhagen (Denmark), Singapore, Toronto (Canada), and Vienna (Austria). Although our analysis of these six smart cities is based on the IMD World Competitiveness Centre Smart City Index,* we havechallenged the structure of the IMD’s investigation and complemented its findings with additional information sources (newspapers, reports, and chapters) that we obtained by examining cities’ websites and digital platforms. This Executive Summary is a synthesis of the six reports, which we prepared in 2020 and 2021. It summarizes all the essential information on each city and presents it through comparative charts. This ebook also includes a first chapter that identifies the main challenges and issues involved in urban transformation. In the final chapter, we set out some perspectives on smart cities and discuss further steps for cities to develop and implement sustainable initiatives and policies. One of the key objectives of the six detailed case studies that comprise the ebook’s main chapters is to report and centralize all information on these smart cities that could be accessed via the cities’ official websites, documents, and frameworks. Therefore, our data are the decisions and deliberations published by the actors (generally elected officials) in charge of urban transformation. After we conducted a detailed review of cities’ publications and websites, we decided to break down our approach into five main topics that are of common relevance to the six cities we study, even if the local forms they take are specific to each city. The boxes below summarize the main topics that are common to the six smart cities. We have given the topics the following labels: Objectives, Frameworks, Technologies, Citizen Participation, and Actors. OBJECTIVES FRAMEWORK TECHNOLOGY Identify the key objectives Identify and report the official Understand and identify of each smart city framework and plan of each the main technologies initiative to understand smart city program to assess used to achieve each citys’ its timeline and focus. the credibility of the policies and objectives and ensure initiatives implemented. sustainable development there. PARTICIPATION ACTORS Identify citizens’ role in Identify smart city smart city initiatives as programs’ key actors well as the mechanisms and the connections for their participation between them. in them. 6 Quélin and Smadja | HEC PARIS | SMART CITIES | The sustainable program of six leading cities | 2021