Cities in Israel and all over the world strive to adapt to the digital age. Such adaptation is a complex, multi-faceted process that affects every aspect of the city’s inhabitants. Where should the cities begin this process? What are the most suitable digital projects for Israeli cities? How does the local context and the communities’ needs affect the decision making? Does the size of the city matter? How should we design the process itself? What are the topics that deserve special attention? This guide offers some answers. We focus on four main topics, which we identify as crucial for the digital city: planning, technology, privacy and inequality.

The starting point of this document is that the “smart city” is mostly a marketing concept, hype and buzz, and should be used carefully, if at all. Moreover, it is impossible to rank cities in a quantitative or qualitative along a “smart” measure of some sort. This Report discusses the digital city, and includes five chapters. The first four, discuss issues at the heart of the digital city: planning, technology, privacy and social inequality. Each chapter opens with a review of the topic in Israel and elsewhere, introduces basic concepts, presents the perspective of Israeli policy makers, based on interviews we conducted, and concludes with some recommendations. The final chapter summarizes the policy recommendations. We provide numerous examples, but do not discuss any particular technology, as specific applications change rapidly.

The report is part of a broader project that examines the vulnerabilities of the digital city – Smart City Cyber Security, funded by the Blavatnik interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel Aviv University.