At the dawn of the twenty-first century, cities face serious societal, economic, environmental, and governance challenges. Under the term "Smart City," numerous technology-based initiatives are emerging to help cities face contemporary challenges while the concept itself is evolving towards a more holistic approach. Nevertheless, the capability of smart initiatives to provide an integrated vision of our cities is still very limited. Eventually, many of these initiatives do not fulfill satisfactorily their initial objectives because they fail to understand the complexity, diversity, and uncertainty that characterize contemporary cities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to display an urban functional system, capable of interpreting the city in a more holistic way, and to incorporate foresight tools so as to formulate Smart City visions in a more participatory way with the involvement of local stakeholders.

Abstract. Under the term "Smart City", numerous technology-based initiatives are emerging to help cities face contemporary challenges while the concept itself is evolving towards a more holistic approach. Nevertheless, the capability of smart initiatives to provide an integrated vision of our cities is still very limited. Eventually, many of these initiatives fail to understand the complexity, diversity and intelligence that characterize contemporary cities. The purpose of this paper is to display an urban functional system, capable of interpreting the city in a more holistic way and of facilitating effective involvement of local stakeholders in the planning process of SCs initiatives.

This article investigates the impact of climate change on the functional systems of intermediate cities in Bangladesh. The aim is to mitigate the immediate challenges posed by the global climate change for small and middle sized cities as future populated urban centers in developing countries. The objective of this study is to formulate a comprehensive framework for climate change resilient urban governance. The conceptual framework of this research adopted the modified structure of S Tyler and M Moench (2012) CRF model incorporating three major components, urban functional system, local urban governance and climate resilience. Five case study cities in Bangladesh have been conceptualized as functional system to identify the change factors. The vulnerability assessment of climate change is to provide the city’s exposure of future climate risks on city’s functional system. The research initiates a resilience building process based on Mehta’s good governance (1998) through a shared learning dialogue (SLD) involving stakeholders. Key words: Urban functional system, Local urban governance, Climate resilience, Intermediate city