Urban performance currently depends not only on the city's endowment of hard infrastructure ('physical capital'), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure ('intellectual and social capital'). The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness. It is against this background that the concept of the "smart city" has been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and to highlight the growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of cities. The significance of these two assets - social and environmental capital - itself goes a long way to distinguish smart cities from their more technology-laden counterparts, drawing a clear line between them and what goes under the name of either digital or intelligent cities.

Smart(er) cities has also been used as a marketing concept by companies and by cities.

Mitchell Joachim (pronounced /jo-ak-um/; born February 3, 1972) is acknowledged as an innovator in ecological design, architecture, and urban design. He is also a researcher, and architectural educator. Mitchell Joachim's specific professional interest has been adapting principles of physical and social ecology to architecture, urban design, transport, and environmental planning.

He is a Partner at Planetary ONE, and Co-Founder at Terreform ONE. Dr. Joachim is an Associate Professor at NYU, and the European Graduate School. Previously he was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto. Earlier, he was faculty at Pratt, Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, and Parsons. Formerly he worked as an architect for Gehry Partners, and Pei Cobb Freed.

Mitchell has been awarded a Senior Fellowship at TED 2011,Moshe Safdie and Assoc. Fellowship, and Martin Society for Sustainability Fellowship at MIT. He won the Zumtobel Group Award, History Channel and Infiniti Design Excellence Award for the City of the Future, and Time Magazine Best Invention of the Year 2007, MIT Car w/ MIT Smart Cities. His project, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was selected by Wired magazine for "The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To". Rolling Stone magazine honored Mitchell as an agent of change in "The 100 People Who Are Changing America". In 2009 he was interviewed on the Colbert Report Popular Science magazine has featured his work as a visionary for “The Future of the Environment” in 2010. Mitchell was the Winner of the Victor Papanek Social Design Award sponsored by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and the Museum of Arts and Design in 2011.