Smart City Practical Handbooks

The Smart City Practical Handbooks: A collection to guide our municipalities step by step towards a more smart and sustainable management of their territory.

 

You want to start a Smart City approach but you don't know where to begin or how to structure your ideas? To respond to this need for guidance, the Smart City Institute has developed a series of practical handobooks that will enable you to compose your own strategy and projects according to the specificities of your territory: the Smart City Practical Handbooks Collection. Every year, nearly 262 municipalities, among others, are sensitised through this collection.

• A first basic volume, which will provide you with the keys to defining your strategy in 15 steps (available in French and Dutch).
• Additional volumes dedicated to specific themes, in order to feed into the first reference volume and to provide, each year, new sources of inspiration to the actors of our territories (available in French only).

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A Practical Handbook for whom?

• A solid theoretical basis for an optimal understanding of the subject treated
• Key supporting steps that will allow you to structure your design process in a clear way
• A checklist, to help you stay on track and keep your goals in mind

Discover the testimonies 

Context : why this collection?

• Belgian municipalities feel unprepared facing the Smart City challenge and find it difficult to grasp;
• While more than 80% of Flemish and Brussels municipalities consider the Smart City concept to be adapted to their territory, in Wallonia, barely 45% of the municipalities affirm this;
• In 2016, only 13% of them had implemented a strategy in this area;
• Finally, the respondents felt that it is essential to train and inform the various stakeholders about the Smart City dynamic and its challenges, asking in particular for a manual with concrete recommendations on the subject.

These observations highlighted a real need for guidance within our municipalities. This is what motivated the Smart City Institute, with the support and expertise of its partners, to write a Practical Handbook for Belgian cities and municipalities.

Concretely: what does the collection consist of?

• Annual publications : Through this concept of the collection, the ambition of the SCI is to provide, each year, a new Practical Handbook to accompany our territories step by step and support their reflections on an ongoing basis.
• Specific themes : Each new volume is dedicated to a new specific theme, in line with the current issues identified by the municipalities. The aim is to respond to their needs as best as possible.
• A digital format that can be downloaded for free: Each volume of the collection is available in a digital version that can be downloaded for free in PDF format via our form.
• Complements: Since the end of 2022, this Collection of Smart City Practical Handbooks has been enriched with the Practical Handbook's Complements. These didactic Complements allow you to deepen your understanding of one or more concepts dealt with in the handbooks, but not developed in detail (very practical insight in a more condensed format).

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About SCI's support missions

Since 2015, the Smart City Institute (SCI) aims to stimulate research, teaching and innovation in the field of smart cities. More concretely, one of its main missions is to develop various instructional projects to motivate Belgian municipalities to take part in the Smart Cities dynamic. The objective is to support them in their transition towards a more smart and sustainable management of their territories. In this perspective, the SCI team has developed several tools: continuing education courses in Smart City Management, conferences and workshops, annual Smart City barometers, but also  Smart City Practical Handbooks and Complements to them : the Practical Handbook's Complements.