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.

Saskia Sassen (born in The Hague, January 5, 1949) is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She currently is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen coined the term global city. She is married to the sociologist Richard Sennett.

Sassen grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where her parents Willem Sassen and Miep van der Voort moved in 1950. She also spent a part of her youth in Italy and says she was "brought up in five languages."

From 1966, Sassen spent a year each at the Université de Poitiers, France, the Università degli Studi di Roma, and the Universidad de Buenos Aires, for studies in philosophy and political science. From 1969, Sassen studied sociology and economics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where she obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1971 and 1974, respectively. In addition, she obtained a French master's degree in philosophy in Poitiers in 1974. In January 2004, Sassen received the honoris causa degree in urbanism at Delft University of Technology.

Carlo F. Ratti (born 1971 in Turin, Italy) is an Italian architect and engineer who practices in Turin, and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab. This lab studies the built environment of cities—from street grids to plumbing and garbage systems—using new kinds of sensors and hand-held electronics that have transformed the way we can describe and understand cities. Other projects flip this equation—using data gathered from sensors to actually create dazzling new environments. The Digital Water Pavilion, for instance, reacts to visitors by parting a stream of water to let them visit. And a new project for the 2012 Olympics in London turns a pavilion building into a cloud of blinking interactive art. He's opening a research center in Singapore as part of an MIT-led initiative on the Future of Urban Mobility.

Ratti grew up in several European countries, graduating in engineering at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, France, and at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. He later earned his MPhil and PhD degrees in architecture from the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2000 he moved to MIT as a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow, working with Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. In 2002 Ratti established the design office carlorattiassociati – Walter Nicolino and Carlo Ratti in Torino, Italy. In 2004, Ratti established the MIT Senseable City Lab, an MIT research group that explores the "real-time city" by studying the increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics, and their relationship to the built environment.

Narendra Damodardas Modi (Gujarati: નરેન્દ્ર મોદી; born 17 September 1950) is the current Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. Born in a middle class family in Vadnagar, he was the third of six children born to Damodardas Mulchand Modi and his wife Heeraben. He has been a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since childhood also having interest in politics since adolescence. He holds a master's degree in political science. In 1998, he was chosen by L. K. Advani, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to direct the election campaign in Gujarat as well as Himachal Pradesh.

He became Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001, promoted to the office at a time when his predecessor Keshubhai Patel had resigned, following the defeat of BJP in the by-elections. His tenure as chief minister of Gujarat began on 7 October 2001, and he is the longest serving Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. In July 2007 he became the longest serving Chief Minister in Gujarat's history when he had been in power for 2063 days continuously. He was elected again for a third term on 23 December 2007 in the state elections, which he had cast as a "referendum on his rule".