For some years now, the smart city has been cited as the new archetype for urban development. Indeed, the discourse-proposal notion of the smart city greatly influences the media and institutional affairs – this has gradually become embedded in the programmes and agendas of institutional urban policies – in addition to academic issues. The cited concept has several definitions, although among the most commonly accepted by the scientific community is that put forward by Caragliu et al. (2011), who defined the city as smart when social investment, human capital, communications and infrastructures coexist in harmony with a view to promoting sustainable and efficient socioeconomic development, relying on the use of ICT to this end.

Achieving cities that work in a sustainable and integrated manner is one of the main challenges of the twenty-first century as their position as epicentre of urban life is reinforced. According to data from the United Nations, 2 out of 3 people will be living in cities by 2050. The same source points out that in Europe, 7 out of 10 people reside in cities, and foresees that this figure will rise. In the case of Spain, the UN estimates that 40% of the Spanish population will be living in 15 cities of more than 300,000 inhabitants (United Nations, 2018). Certainly, the increase in the degree of urbanisation tentatively reveals the main challenges to which local governments must respond with sustainable urban planning, which in turn should generate economic opportunities. This calls for better deployment of public resources and a responsible use of natural resources to optimise the uses of transport and infrastructure, preserve and increase energy efficiency, ensure accessibility of services and be vigilant towards the environment. The idea of the smart city thus emerges as a city that exploits the capabilities of technology to optimise sustainability and improve people's quality of life. The notion of an interconnected future where all the information gathered is measured, processed and analysed in order to improve the use and efficiency of the resources and services that are provided, thus contributing to the most appropriate decision-making.

However, the highly complex urban structure that has long been associated only with large cities has changed with the new demographic, as urban settlements of this kind have slower population growth rates than other relatively smaller urban centres (Bouskela et al., 2016). Thus, intermediate cities have also grown at an accelerated pace. Although the term intermediate city can give rise to diverse interpretations, a traditional delimitation in line with the UIA-CIMES1 programme is based on its size. Thus, following the norm of the European context, the range is delimited between 20,000 and 500,000 inhabitants. However, intermediate cities cannot be delimited exclusively based on variables such as demographic size or geographical area. The most appropriate approaches at territorial level go beyond the classical ways of classifying and delimiting intermediate cities, by mainly focusing on the intermediary functions performed by this type of cities in the territory and their vocation to articulate specific spaces with other nodes and territories in the local and regional scope.

Along this line, more than half of the urban population of the planet lives in intermediate cities and the accelerated growth observed in them can affect the sustainability and quality of life of their inhabitants (UCLG, 2017). The European Territorial Strategy (1999) acknowledges the importance of developing a more balanced and orderly European urban system, able to generate a polycentric development in order to assure the delivery of resources, services, employment and innovation to the majority of the population through city networks, while also seeking greater territorial cohesion (Romero & Farinós, 2004). Thus, the intermediate cities that fulfil functions as regional capitals take on an essential role in these areas and are important centres for the development of industrial activities and services, research and technology, tourism and leisure (European Commission, 1999). Many of these intermediate cities act as functional hubs for areas consisting of other cities and towns, and delimited by criteria such as the movements of people, urban expansion, the provision of supra-municipal services and public transport corridors, and which articulate the territory comprehensively. These areas should also therefore be subject to territorial management and planning if the smart city approach is to be applied in these towns, and especially if they are also poles of tourist attraction. The territorial dimension and the policies that are applied can influence the dynamics of organisational innovations in the tourism sector (and related areas) and help build innovation systems (Zach & Hill, 2017).

The concept of an intelligent tourist destination ultimately arises from the notion of smart cities (Ivars et al., 2017; Zhu et al., 2014), but focusing more on tourism development. In the tourism scope, smart cities present new challenges while providing new service and business opportunities. To be able to better adopt the smart structure in cities where the tourism sector is the economic driving force, the so-called intelligent destinations have been dubbed Smart Tourism Destinations. According to López de Ávila et al. (2015:32), a smart city is defined as a “tourism-oriented and innovative space accessible to all, which is consolidated on a cutting-edge technological infrastructure, which must guarantee sustainable territorial development while facilitating visitor interaction and integration with the environment, increasing the quality of their experience in the destination and the quality of life of the residents.” Thus, the authors who have so far addressed the conceptualisation of STDs point to the features of “Smart Cities” in their line of argument as a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of STDs (Lamsfus & Alzua-Sorzabal, 2013; Zhu et al., 2014).

The smart city has become common ground for the urban discourse whose tenet has been received with enthusiasm in the media, institutional and academic sphere. But this ideal city entails considerable challenges. Many of these hurdles are linked with the 6 dimensions or pillars posited by the model: population, environment, mobility, economy, quality of life and governance (Enerlis et al., 2012; Giffinger et al., 2007; Giffinger & Gudrun, 2010); as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

The dimensions (pillars) of smart cities.

Source: Own creation, adapted from Giffinger and Gudrun (2010).

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In line with the above, the core of the discourse proposed by this urban model is that the techno-smart city will improve the quality of life of cities, charting the path towards change in the socioeconomic structure of cities, based on the capacity for omnipresent connection and information sharing, being proactive with our environment and protecting the sustainability of the habitat. So, a smart city must be specially enabled for the use of ICT, designed to improve competitive edge and sustainability based on the interconnection and exchange of information between people, companies, institutions, infrastructures, energy, consumption and the different services and spaces that make up the urban environment or habitat. In the sense, we agree with Guo et al. (2014), when stating that STDs ultimately depend on the city's technology infrastructure and the interchanges and uses made of information resources and the processing of data intelligence.

In this sense, the implementation of ICTs in this concept of city is crucial to be able to capture the data related to tourism and the data left by tourists visiting the place, with a view to providing services in real time and personalised, while leveraging them to optimise strategic management that will help improve the tourist experience in the town. Technological innovations also lay the foundations for new tourism experiences (Hjalager, 2015). For Segittur (2015), the intention to evolve towards STDs involves setting out a strategy to reassess the destination, which will help boost its competitive edge by making better use of its strengths, creating innovative resources, enhancing the efficiency of production processes and a distribution that finally addresses sustainable development in order to facilitate visitor integration in the destination. ICTs are a key factor in transformation of the tourism industry, contributing to management of the city and destination through intelligent technologies, thus aligning with smart model approaches (Invat.tur-Valencian Institute of Tourism Technologies, 2015). In this context, the propagation of mobile telephony and its different applications also plays an important role (Kim & Law, 2015; Lamsfus et al., 2015).

As highlighted by López de Ávila and Sánchez (2013), an STD is considered an innovative space based on the territory and a state-of-the-art technological infrastructure, committed to sustainability and with the socioeconomic and cultural singularities of the habitat, equipped with an intelligence system able to effectively capture, analyse and interpret information in real time, thus encouraging interaction between visitors and their surroundings and enriching the quality of tourist experiences. So, in this complex context the STD requires the joint and coordinated action of both the private and public sectors to draw up an integral action plan -or master plan-, as the urban question merits diverse and plural scrutiny (Monnet et al., 2013), given the qualities that each discipline or scope of knowledge can contribute, without exclusively circumscribing strictly touristic aspects. Although ICTs and advanced technological innovations provide the essential substrate for the development of STDs, this alone is not enough.

In this sense, advancing towards becoming an STD should be a collective and shared task, involving both local institutions and tourism companies as well as society on the whole, including tourists; in short, those who are its true protagonists (Hernández, 2007; Fernàndez, 2014). Management and urban planning of the model should mainly concentrate on the human issues of urban habitat, rather than focusing exclusively on the technocratic vision of urban-technological planning and the accumulation of technologies, the result of which would be a more marketing-oriented model rather than a functional-pragmatic approach. In this line, we are generally faced with rather uncritical institutional discourse regarding the idea of the smart approach and the consequent technological deployment in cities, due to the question: Who could be against this ideal? “Smart” projects of this nature unavoidably call for the participation of interest groups in their determination to solve the real problems of the urban habitat, above all, if they intend to satisfy the consumers and be sustainable in the long term. Although there are abundant studies in the scientific literature based mainly on the importance of the use of ICT as a smart tourism resource (Wang et al., 2012), there is still a lack of research that explains the phenomenon in a more systematic and global way (Ivars-Baidal et al., 2018).

Tackling the challenge of smart cities necessarily involves participation of the different stakeholders, which constitutes one of the main elements to achieve governance in cities (Buhalis & Amaranggana, 2014; Díaz, 2017; Fernández Alcantud et al., 2017; Gómez & Martín, 2015; Santos-Júnior et al., 2016; Tomàs & Cegarra, 2016). The plurality and complexity of urban habitats has motivated many studies aimed at identifying stakeholders to account for their classification and the interactions that occur between them (Bramwell & Lane, 2011; Khomsi & Bedard, 2017; Liu, 2003), which is why we find as many classifications as there are studies on the subject. Nevertheless, the review of the scientific literature identifies a typology common to all classifications in terms of who the smart city stakeholders are: the public sector, the private sector, civil society, and, in the case of tourist cities, the tourists themselves. Defining a city's transition to becoming a smart city requires new ways of delimiting government action and new operative models between the actors and administrative levels of government involved in the decision-making process regarding urban policies with an impact on the territory.

In recent years, city planning and management has hinged around the notion of governance as a new process of governing to the detriment of the classical notion of government as a nuclear agent (Aguilar, 2010), a question that reminds us that the society we live in is a public reality that everyone understands and is involved in, which therefore must be the result of a collective project. In this line, in recent decades, in the context of the formulation of public policies among the actors and the different levels of administration, these changes have been reflected in the manner of governing with a more open, decentralised style of government, less hierarchical, more horizontal and accessible (Hall, 2011; John, 2001). Efforts are made to incorporate the different interest groups in the debate on public issues in the territorial scope, which entails a process of participation and coordination of the actors in objectives that must be determined collectively (Le Galès, 2004). However, such an ideal of governance may be too idyllic a vision. It probably is. In this sense, authors such as Kübler and Wälti (2017) consider that in this kind of ideal of governance, citizens have greater power in the decision-making processes, evidencing a clear optimism. In contrast, other authors such as Stone (1989) highlight an opportunity for the private and particular interests of private companies and organisations under this new governance. Whatever the case, and despite the obstacles to be overcome, the current context of governance and the attempt to move towards an intelligent tourist destination requires the creation of a “touristic” governance through public-private collaboration and the community as an essential element (Buhalis & Amaranggana, 2014; Cambrils, 2015; Sigalat et al., 2018b), in addition to management support from local government.

Gandia is a town and municipality in the southeast of Spain, located on the coast of Valencia province, in the Valencian Community. It is the capital of the La Safor region, located 65km south of Valencia (Fig. 2). The municipal area is located in the heart of the district, with a population of 73,289 inhabitants (INE, 2019), although it is estimated that its floating population is around 100,000–120,000 people, ranking as the seventh most populated city and one of the most important in Valencian territory.

Fig. 2.

Map of the city of Gandia.

Source: Own creation based on map of Territorial and Provincial Directorates of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism of Spain (2019).

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The city is between the Mediterranean Sea and a surrounding mountainous belt. Its municipal jurisdiction covers an area of 61.5km2 with three population centres: Gandia town, the Grao de Gandia (port and beaches) and Marxuquera. The city is a tourist destination that combines beach with natural and mountain areas; leisure alongside culture, history and commerce; a varied offer of entertainment and relaxation. There is more than 5km of coastline and over 500,000m2 of fine sandy beaches. The city also boasts 25 hotels and more than 5,200 hotel rooms, with over 8,000 regulated spaces in apartments and 1,700 in campsites. This accounts for a total of more than 15,000 accommodation places (INE and Turisme Comunitat Valenciana, 2019).

Since the 60s of last century, the city has become one of the main Valencian tourist destinations, reaching three times its population in high season, rising to 320,000–350,000 inhabitants in summer. A typical Mediterranean climate and a remarkable tourist infrastructure in the destination with recognised quality and environmental seals, along with good communications and accessibility, make up an attractive space for the visitor all year round. Thus, tourism has become the city's main economic driving force, an aspect that has brought with it the development of the services sector, which occupies almost 76% of the population (INE, 2019).

In this line, many intermediate tourist towns share characteristic elements in common (Sigalat et al., 2018a, 2018b), as does the city of Gandia. We highlight three main elements. The first is the shifting of their economies to the tertiary sector. The second consists of cities with tourist attractions beyond their beaches and good weather, for their historical-patrimonial, natural-landscape, cultural and leisure value, a capital element in tourists’ motivation to travel. In third place, they are usually destinations with a similar population size, which tend to triple their population in high season and with considerable intraregional tourism, with important travel flows that may be greater depending on whether or not they have certain infrastructures, such as motorways, railway, airport and marine transport connections, among the most notable.

Finally, given all of the above, we should highlight that tourism is not a safe activity for the places where it is developed. Lack of planning for spaces can give rise to undesired impacts. In this sense, and in the context of becoming an STD, we reveal the positive and negative impacts of tourism, both internal and external, with reference to Gandia as a destination, through a SWOT analysis, in such a way that it furnishes us with basic information on the town's transformation to the propensities and requirements of becoming a smart tourist destination (Table 2).

Based on the smart city dimensions and following the methodology explained, key tourism informants were consulted in order to contextualise the destination based on the requirements proposed by the model. By way of summary, the following table details the responses of the different informants consulted to each of the dimensions or basic pillars of smart cities based on the destination studied (Table 3).

Table 3.

Stakeholders’ opinion of the destination.

Source: Own creation.

One of the keys to ensuring the smart focus is achieved is the role represented by the city's population. As regards the population dimension, citizenship constitutes the main nucleus around which the rest of the city's dimensions and components must revolve. This approach necessarily requires the participation of stakeholders in their determination to solve real problems. Beyond the orientations of the technological companies involved in the destination with some incipient initiatives, it has not been possible to provide an essential and shared consensus attempting to incorporate the different interest groups in the debate on the public affairs of the destination in collectively defined objectives. Thus, the majority of the interviewees considered that this cornerstone of the smart paradigm still remains to be developed. This quote from one of the participants interviewed is highly illustrative: “First of all, technology needs to listen to people, to businesses… to see the problems first and… after that decide which is the best…” (E2). Smart cities are more about citizens than technologies for the resolution of real problems. Although, as noted by Tomàs and Cegarra (2016), the smart city has left little room for citizen participation, and both citizens and other interest groups have been left out of the smart model definition: “There is a lack of awareness in the population and stakeholder involvement in a global vision of the issue. The basic problems are not technological.” (E5). So, the model according to authors such as Hernández (2007) or Fernàndez (2014), among others, does not cover the real protagonists.

In turn, the mobility dimension refers to the sustainability, efficiency and safety of transport systems and infrastructures, as well as accessibility at local and other territorial levels. This is a dimension pending development. On this issue, territorial planning and acting with sustainability-based criteria have not been the norm: “The problems of the N-332 road and variants are a disaster due to traffic congestion and pollution issues for the city and the region.” (E5). Likewise, this is compounded by the deficit of public transport in the region with respect to the destination: “There is a considerable lack of territorial cohesion in terms of regional transport to the destination … The private vehicle has won the battle.” (E4). Consequently, the private vehicle becomes the main means of transport, causing serious problems in a destination that triples its population in the summer period. Decisions on transport infrastructure should therefore be subject to intelligent planning to articulate the destination, linking it with the municipalities of the region's interior as well as outwardly (Vercher & Sigalat, 2017).

The governance dimension (government) refers to the notion of transparency. In other words, the fact that the city manufactures and generates data through all kinds of open source technology for the entire smart city value chain, from Big Data4 to the Internet of Things (software, sensors, etc.) and other applications and that the resulting information is accessible, as set forth in the 1999 Aarhus Convention (Enerlis et al., 2012). Thus, most of the interviewees consider that this basic pillar of the smart paradigm is being developed. Therefore, this intelligence system able to effectively capture, analyse and interpret information in real time advocated by López de Ávila et al. (2015) for consideration as an STD, is in its primary phase. In this respect, the comment by one of the participants interviewed is highly illustrative: “Steps are being taken… but more by the Administration than the private sector… Adapting a smart model is largely going to be a very laborious process, as the sector is very traditional” (E1). However, the Administration has taken important steps with creation of the Gandia City Council Transparency Portal and other smart initiatives derived and guided by technological companies (and listed in the SWOT analysis).): “The city of Gandia is taking steps in all dimensions of the smart city initiative, especially in the Smart Government and Smart People dimensions, which I understand to be key dimensions for development of the others. In Smart Government, on the one hand I highlight the city's commitment to e-Administration and open government to achieve a better relationship with the citizens. The development of a Smart Tourism Master Plan, currently in the drafting process… and scheduled for presentation during the first four months of 2019… Contains several elements of the smart city plan, and it is intended to be a coherent tool for development of the Smart Destination project in Gandia” (E6).

Regarding the sustainability dimension, the city is developing interesting projects, especially in terms of beach dune conservation and the environmental preservation of landscapes, the accessibility of its beaches with recognised tourism quality seals, as well as an adequate hotel infrastructure adapted to tourists with special needs. The growing environmental sensitivity among public officials, businesses and citizens should be an opportunity for in-depth study to assess the numerous environmental resources (Sigalat et al., 2018a), as issues such as traffic congestion and noise and environmental pollution in a destination that triples its population both in summer and other holiday periods throughout the year are perceived by those consulted as factors still pending resolution: “Traffic, noise and parking… at the beach are problems we’ve always had and they need to be resolved.” (E2), “We must be more efficient also with lighting, becoming more energy efficient in many areas…” (E5). To the above information we shall add a consideration of interest that reminds us that rather than being a techno-intelligent model, the project must respond to the problems of citizens and businesses: “It's not just about making technological improvements or focusing only on our tourist offer… There is still a lot to be done on urbanism issues as well and technology alone is not going to resolve this.” (E4).

As for the economic dimensions, and following its theoretical approach, the smart city project represents a model that hones the competitive edge of territories, with a positive impact on the quality of life and encouraging the attraction of investments. When implementing a smart model, it is essential to be able to quantify the return on the investments made, both in economic and social terms (Enerlis et al., 2012). In other words, to be able to answer which costs, what income and what savings can be obtained by rolling out the smart model. In this sense, although there is a perception on the part of the actors involved that this model will sharpen the destination's competitive edge, with positive repercussions in all areas – “This smart city approach can help improve competitiveness thanks to the improvement in the quality of the tourist offer at the destination.” (E3) – it is no less true that it is still perceived by the interviewees as very distant and yet to be developed, both because it is seen as a costly issue – “The tourism sector here is very traditional in general … it's going to be expensive.” (E2), “The start-up technology is expensive and the sector needs to see the return on investment in the mid-term…” (E1) –, and not yet widely known: “There is no common vision or understanding of the sector in all this … In fact, all this smart city stuff is something that many of us, including business people, don’t even know what it is …” (E4).

Finally, regarding the quality of life dimension, the informants consulted note that it is a destination and an area with a diverse and high value natural heritage, located in a privileged geographical environment, with excellent weather conditions and an appreciable quality of life, which, along with the notable resources and services, both public and private, present in the city, mean that if we can manage to unify and optimise their management and focus the provision of services using these technologies, an even higher quality of life for citizens and visitors can be achieved: “Gandia is a privileged destination … if we know how to unite all this type of technologies and put them at the service of citizens and the tourism sector in the future, we will achieve that Smart Living, because the base is good.” (E5). So, the city has the basis for development of so-called Smart Living (quality of life of the destination). All that remains to be done consists of assembling the smart tourist information systems in the destination with the participation of interest groups and taking into account the rest of the dimensions in this transition to becoming a Smart Tourism Destination. However, according to Buhalis and Amaranggana (2014), this calls for the creation of a “tourist” governance that brings together public-private and community collaboration in this type of projects.