Provincial but smart - urban-rural relationships in Brandenburg/Germany.

Abstract

While the idea of intelligent or smart cities started a vivid discussion and brought up a whole variety of strategies to transform urban areas into smart cities, the discussion about smart regions is less developed and rather vague. By looking into trends and strategies developed in the first implementation projects, one general lesson learned is that there is not just one approach to transforming regions into smart regions, but that innovation and smartness need to be related to their specific spatial, infrastructural and sociopolitical contexts (place-based approach). This contribution discusses existing concepts of Smart Regions and argues that peripheral regions may similarly become smart by implementing place-based approaches. In a first step, a short literature review on smart regions and challenges of the peripheral is presented. In a second step, new approaches in peripheral regions will be analyzed and discussed by providing and comparing three case studies from the Brandenburg region in Germany.