
To date, many smart city pioneers have embarked on large-scale, visionary city transformation projects requiring significant financial resources.
Now, a much wider selection of global cities – along with their commercial stakeholders – are looking to initiate smart projects and developments to improve the efficiency of local services, enhance sustainability, attract business and talent, and develop their competitiveness. This has been encouraged by more widespread government smart city initiatives and the availability of competitive private-sector financing.
At the same time, there is a growing realization that public sector budgets are usually inadequate to fund smart city development, so raising funds from the private sector is becoming commonplace globally. This may be done directly by city authorities or by private sector participants and contributors like commercial building owners or private subcontractors providing services to the public sector.