Smart Cities: From Silos to Cross-Border Approach

This paper introduces a new dimension to conceptualising smart cities – a cross-border approach for heterogeneous cities. There is a mutual agreement between smart city scholars that cities are smart when they reduce silos and enable better flow of data between city functions and services. This paper focuses on the cross-border aspect of smart cities and claims that ICT in cities do not automatically lead to ubiquitous services across the cities. This can even lead to more fragmentation compared to pre-ICT area. A new model for joint digital services in the cross-border cities – the Urban Operating System – is proposed and will be evaluated in context of two Northern European cities with high commuting frequency: Helsinki and Tallinn.