ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one of Tel Aviv’s success stories: a smart city flagship initiative that incorporated technology and a savvy, needs-based digital infrastructure to connect Tel Aviv Municipality with its residents: the Digi-Tel Residents Card. It describes the links from city branding to smart cities and information and communication technology (ICT) to citizen-led decision-making that would inform future urban planning designs and policy. A smart city is “a city in which ICT is merged with traditional infrastructures, coordinated and integrated using new digital technologies”. The chapter discusses Tel Aviv’s place-branding strategy, which began by encouraging domestic tourism but then went global. It examines how municipalities can discover and exploit unique ‘smart city’ characteristics in their local area to create a shared sense of stewardship and ownership of the decisions made to benefit the local community and wider society.
