The Quadruple Helix Model as a Smart City Design Principle

The article presents considerations on the quadruple helix model as a principle of smart city design in which technological and social innovations result from cooperation and seeking synergies among four groups of stakeholders: administration, business, science and residents. The overriding goal of this synergy should be to improve the quality of residents’ life in various dimensions of their individual and socio-professional functioning. An optimal model of urban management and creation of a Smart City and a Smart Sustainable City is based on knowledge, properly disseminated and distributed, as a condition for acquiring interdisciplinary competences. The cities develop for their inhabitants, without whom they become empty and die. Therefore, a holistic model of managing a Smart City should be adopted, aiming at shaping a Smart Sustainable City on this basis, i.e. taking such management solutions that do not exclude any group of stakeholders and any urban system or subsystem bearing in mind the environment and future generations. In the article, the authors present selected solutions for creating Smart Cities and Smart Sustainable Cities based on the top-down model and bottom-up model, recognizing, at the same time, that well-designed synergy among the entities of the quadruple helix is based on knowledge and its proper dissemination and distribution.