Over the last decade the 'smart city' concept has emerged to represent technology-driven urban benefits and the products and services that deliver them.
For national governments, the smart city is attractive because it represents an opportunity to improve its towns and cities and to access a large global market, estimated to be in the order of $1.3 trillion and growing by 17% each year.
National governments are ramping up their efforts to remove barriers that are preventing regional and municipal governments from applying smart city solutions and local businesses from developing and exporting related products and services. This paper explores smart cities projects that have taken place in Denmark looking at four very different Danish cities (Copenhagen, Aarhus, Vejle, Albertslund) shows the widespread pursuit of smart city benefits by all of these players and identifies some of the obstacles to adoption that are faced.