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Introduction
Monaco belongs to the long list of cities that aim to become smart. As Hollands (2008, p. 305) asks, “which city, by definition, does not want to be smart?” The general literature on smart cities is quite abundant but the empirical studies on smart cities is still in its infancy (Anthopoulos et al., 2018; Albino et al., 2015; Caragliu and Del Bo, 2017; Caragliu et al., 2011; Meijer and Bolivar, 2016; Tompsom, 2017; Vanolo, 2014; Zygiaris, 2013). Since the concept’s development in the literature, numerous use cases have sought to create guidelines for smart cities’ development (Giffinger et al., 2007; Lazaroiu and Roscia, 2012; Lim et al., 2018). Although far from being idiosyncratic – because all smart cities experiences share some common principles – smart development must recognize the local context, which depends on local resources, ambitions and abilities to integrate stakeholders.
Generally speaking, a smart city refers to a competitive, productive and pleasant place to live (Attour and Rallet, 2014), with a vision driven by information technology (IT) and relying on specific infrastructures that connect personal mobile devices with other technologies (Hashem et al., 2016), such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud storage or big data (Liu, L., 2018). More recently, it has been established that the building of a smart city is contingent on three pillars: technology, human resources and governance (Meijer and Bolivar, 2016). This principle serves as a means to enhance the global efficiency and quality of life of residents. As Fabry et al. (2018) argue, a smart city is a complex and resilient urban ecosystem that embeds several stakeholders, is driven by IT, innovation and environmental concerns, and benefits from adapted governance.
As a concept in construction, several terms have defined the contribution of technology in a tourism context. For its part, the “smart” concept in tourism is commonly used at two different levels. The first is smart tourism (Buhalis and Amaranggana, 2015; Boes et al., 2016; Koo et al., 2016; Li, Hu, Huang and Duan, 2017), working at the broadest level and applying before, during and after the trip. It is often considered as a way to enhance the quality of the touristic experience through IT (Boes et al.