The Smart Sustainable City of Stavanger
Abstract
Smart city initiatives have in many ways become an answer for solving societal issues in anurban context. But lately, a debate has arisen concerning to what degree the smart city, withits technological focus, facilitates sustainable cities and societies. This study investigates towhat extent smart city initiatives and climate and environment initiatives can co-exist andmutually solve climate and environmental challenges in cities. The study applies an abductiveresearch strategy to qualitative data produced from a case study of Stavanger municipality inNorway. It draws on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with actors from thepublic and private sector related to the smart city and climate and environment commitment inStavanger. The findings from this research will be discussed up against relevant theoreticalframeworks. Governmental inter-organizational information integration (GIII) will be appliedto the discussion to evaluate communication, transparency, collaboration, and coordination inthe municipality organization. Additionally, the discussion will use regional industrial pathdevelopment (RIPD) to map out possibilities for sustainable industry development in theStavanger region. The research has shown that the smart city and the climate and environmentcommitments in Stavanger municipality fail to coordinate their work. However, they shareseveral of the same focus areas with their related challenges. These commitments showdifferent sets of values and approaches towards climate and environmental challenges. Thesedifferences result in misconceptions and cast a shadow over possible collaborations. TheStavanger region finds itself struggling from solid dependency on the declining oil and gasindustry concerning sustainable business development. But the smart city commitment canfacilitate the growth of new, green industries in the region, given that local policies facilitateit.