Capacity Building in Smart Cities and Smart Governance in Latin America

Smart cities are characterized by a new way of governing with the use of technology and the consequent increase in the public administration capacity in focus on improving the quality of life of citizens. Smart cities initiatives are a manner for governments changing urban spaces, by increasing the provision of public services and democracy. There are many concepts of smart city. In this project we focus on the approach that relates the concept of smart cities with the notion of governance, in which it perceives a greater intention on value creation through society considering aspects such as leadership, citizen participation, partnerships, public-private partnerships, accountability, responsiveness, transparency, collaboration, data sharing, and information integration services and communication. Smart city is a multidimensional and interdisciplinary domain. People that will work in this field need to have very specialized skills that can be built upon areas such as Business Administration, Computer Science, Architecture and Urbanism, Urban Planning, Political Science, among others. There is demand for starting graduating people in the first level of higher education, for example through a module of the bachelor in business administration or urban planning courses. For professionals that already have a degree in the related areas or who already work in smart city-related initiatives postgraduate programmes can be an opportunity for specialization in this field in order to address the new challenges and new technologies of the contemporary society. For professors and researchers in the mentioned areas there is also a demand for training and international collaboration to share local expertise in different regions. A MOOC can be a learning tool to be used to reach more people and increase the accessibility and sustainability of the project. In this regards we propose to build capacity in the field of smart city and smart governance in order to increase the competences in developing countries in Latin America to address the challenges of the contemporary society. The specific objective of this proposal is providing education and training at undergraduate, post-graduate and continuing education level in order to create new or complement curricula.