PhD defence F. (Negar) Noori

City branding is increasingly practiced in cities with a strong drive to engage in urban (re)development in the post-oil era through enhancing ‘ecological mod-ernization’. One of the most popular brands among them is ‘Smart City’, howev-er, some of the adopted city branding strategies lack sophistication.In the past decade, the popularity of using Smart City labels for sustainable tech-no-driven urbanization has increased dramatically.Recently in numerous countries around the world, policy makers in urban areas pay a lot of attention to the programs associated with the development of Smart Cities. Many urban managers, however, are now just beginning to learn how to ‘do’ Smart City development. Nevertheless, building such an advanced techno-driven city seems very expensive and cities that are just getting started can potentially make it cost-effective through a learning process by technology, policy and experiences transfer and avoid having to reinvent the wheel.Cities running Smart City programs seem to want a lot, but do not always know how to do it, and intend to learn from leading Smart Cities running good practic-es projects. The assumption underlying this research is that they can do so, but must realize that first, the readiness for becoming Smart is crucial and second, the political, legal, institutional and cultural context in donor countries are differ-ent. Context plays an important role and transferring lessons and policies is not something that occurs in a vacuum.Furthermore, taking steps in the complicated process of travelling policies (from donor countries to the recipient) requires a comprehensive framework to show pathways, and/or roadmaps.To address these challenges and gaps the author first examines what indica-tors can be used for evaluating the credibility of city brands and apply these to the ‘Smart City’ brand. The proposed ‘brand credibility evaluation' framework applies to Iranian large cities which are our candidates of the recipient for adopt-ing Smart City policies from good practices in this research. The results indicate that four large Iranian cities have the credible brand of ‘Smart’ that justify them as illustrative examples for Smart City policy recipient.  Then an Input-Output (IO) model of the Smart City development process helping policy makers and analysts make informed design choices is developed. The IO model translates key required resources, the capabilities of transforming resources to intended appli-cations, and the desired application of this development process into inputs, throughputs, and outputs. In the next step the (IO) model is used to retrieve which design variables are at play and lead to which output in the following Smart City projects: Smart Dubai, Masdar City, Barcelona Smart City, and Am-sterdam Smart City. In fact, a Smart City design framework  is developed based on the (IO) model which is used as a tool to analyze Smart City good practices. The result of analyzing the four cases (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Masdar, and Du-bai) indicates how their Smart City development pathways are different. In the next step, a framework for assessing Smart City readiness is presented to develop a Theory of Change for recipient cities to be ready for becoming ‘Smart’. The framework is applied to the examples of the recipient cities (four large Iranian cities with a credible brand of ‘Smart’) to examine their readiness for becoming Smart.  The result represents political readiness is the main challenge for Iranian cities. And finally, all the conceptual and theoretical frameworks mentioned ena-bled the author to propose a comprehensive framework to analyze ‘travelling‘ Smart City policy from donor countries to recipients; i.e. the so-called ‘Smart City Policy Transplantation’ framework. This framework is the first comprehensive framework for Smart City policy travelling that uses the terminology of ‘Trans-plantation’ inspired by comparative law (legal transplantation) and political sci-ence (institutional transplantation). The main idea behind using this terminology is that ‘The Smart City Policy Transplantation’ framework is not only about the policy traveling but also accommodating of the policy travel.

Due to corona, the PhD defences do not take place publicly in the usual way in the Senate Hall or in the Professor Andries Querido Room. The candidates will defend their dissertation either in a small group or online.