By synthesizing urbanization challenges and current trends in Africa, this dialogue piece captures the broader transformative processes taking place on the continent. We develop a vision of the African cities of the future and show the alignment of key aspects of the 'smart city' concept with the African Union's Agenda 2063. Looking at the approximately 50-year time horizon of Agenda 2063 (at the time of writing, 2016), we chart the strategy space for African megacities, medium cities, as well as small cities and new developments. Strategic insights are captured in summary and conclusions.
Public sector organizations (city authorities) have begun to explore ways to exploit big data to provide smarter solutions for cities. The way organizations learn to use new forms of technology has been widely researched. However, many public sector organisations have found themselves in new territory in trying to deploy and integrate this new form of technology (big data) to another fast moving and relatively new concept (smart city). This paper is a cross-sectional scoping study-from two UK smart city initiatives-on the learning processes experienced by elite (top management) stakeholders in the advent and adoption of these two novel concepts. The findings are an experiential narrative account on learning to exploit big data to address issues by developing solutions through smart city initiatives. The findings revealed a set of moves in relation to the exploration and exploitation of big data through smart city initiatives: (a) knowledge finding; (b) knowledge reframing; (c) inter-organization collaborations and (d) ex-post evaluations. Even though this is a time-sensitive scoping study it gives an account on a current state-of-play on the use of big data in public sector organizations for creating smarter cities. This study has implications for practitioners in the smart city domain and contributes to academia by operationalizing and adapting Crossan et al's (Acad Manag Rev 24(3): 522-537, 1999) 4I model on organizational learning.
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