Smart city strategies in enhancement of quality of life: Example of Sakarya Metropolitan Municipality and a model proposal for the local governments in Turkey

Modern cities face various environmental, transportational, security and migration-related challenges and socio-economic inequalities caused by intense population growth. Varieties of city management strategies have been developed to cope with these threats, such as sustainable cities, livable cities, and smart city strategies come to the fore. Innovative and knowledge-based approaches to smart city strategies are distinguished amongst other city management strategies. However, no commonly-held definition exists for the concept of a smart city. Common elements in different definitions appear as; data, knowledge, ICTs, and quality of life. Thus, in this study, a smart city is defined as "a city management strategy that mainly focuses on its internal dynamics and aims to enhance the city's quality of life standards through the innovative technologies, various data sources, and knowledge in line with its needs and priorities." Local governments are the most critical stakeholders of smart city strategies since the development of physical and technological infrastructures of cities is under local governments' initiative. Thanks to technological developments, local governments have sustained their public services more effectively and efficiently. In particular, ICTs allow users to reach instant data acquisition, providing important conveniences to city managers. In this manner, the main research question of this study is "how can smart city strategies of local governments in Turkey contribute more effectively to the cities' quality of life?" Following this main question, nine sub-questions under eight themes were investigated. The research setting is determined as Sakarya Metropolitan Municipality (SMM) since it is the first local government that has already started to implement a smart city strategy and its action plan in Turkey. Considering SMM's unique structure and its experience within the scope of the research problem, the thesis was designed as a single case study through constructivist grounded theory approach. Different techniques such as interviews, document analysis, and observations were used during data acquisition. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-three employees working in SMM with different titles. Content analysis was used to interpret data via Max QDA qualitative data analysis software. Results show that SMM follows a data-driven approach in its smart city strategy. Within SMM, there is no institutional structure (knowledge center) established for data analytics and sharing with other stakeholders. Due to this deficiency, it has been observed that some problems are encountered in the process of transforming raw information (data) to structured data (knowledge). Low budget/high costs, leave of employment due to unsatisfactory wages, restrictions due to legal regulations, and late adoption of transformation by the stakeholders are the other important problems. A stakeholder&knowledge centric, adaptive, and understandable by the decision makers model is presented for SMM and all other local governments in Turkey concerning all these findings.