Title: Building of smart cities in specific conditions of transitional economies

The word smart belongs to the most used and for sure the trendiest words of the present. Currently the main aim of everything is to be smart. The same story appears with cities. Smart city is super trendy term and dream of development planners, urbanists, mayors, entrepreneurs, NGO´s and local communities. How to turn that dream into reality is a real challenge. Strategies of smart development are usually oriented on metropolitan areas and huge cities as these cities have great potential of any kind. CEE countries have different urban structure as western countries. In CEE countries there are only few metropolitan areas but they grow very fast, especially metropolitan areas including capital cities. Massive population growth and influx of population, despite many advantages, bring also a lot of problems to these metropolitan areas (environmental, transport, etc.) and increase disparities among capital city regions and rest of the regions in CEE countries. These metropolitan areas necessarily need to be smart, to be able to survive and service all their inhabitants. These metropolitan areas also have naturally good preconditions to become smart as they concentrate the best human capital of the countries. They concentrate creative class, are well equipped by culture and infrastructure, needed public infrastructure is already there. These areas also naturally concentrate the best entrepreneurs; all needed administrative institutions are available. Through the synergy effect, strong representation has also non-profit sector with several kinds of NGO´s involved in public life. However, not the whole Europe can, and also luckily don´t want to, live in metropolitan areas. A lot of smart people prefer small and medium-sized cities for life and work because of different reasons (for example quality of environment, family issues, high price of living in metropolitan area, overall quality of life etc…). This trend offers unique opportunity to small and medium-sized cities to attract smart people, keep smart youngsters in their territory, start up new entrepreneurs and to expand number of smart cities. CEE countries have very specific but generally common features. They have common part of history as were a part of Soviet Union, after reaching their independency in 1989 they have had to fight with common problems and issues. Although several countries are a part of the European Union and are trying to get closer to western European countries, there is still a big gap among western part of EU and CEE countries. The same story appears also in building smart cities. In comparison with Western countries there is still big gap in building real smart cities in the conditions of transitional economies. In the paper we pay attention to this issue. In the first part of the paper we process theoretical knowledge related with the topic of smart cities with focus on its possible exploitation in the conditions of transitional economies. Analytical part of the paper is aimed on mapping potential for creating smart cities in conditions of transitional economies. In the third part of the paper we process good practices related with building and functioning of smart cities that serve as a good example for policy and decision makers in condition of transitional economies.