TERRITORIAL COMPETITIVENESS AND SMART CITY: BENCHMARKING ANALYSIS OF DUBAI, ABU DHABI, RIYADH, CAIRO, AND RABAT

Abstract. Recently, rapid urbanization and population growth rises complexity, problems, challenges to cities, and then cause more competition between them. The smart city, as a new emerging concept, becomes a crustal solution for many cities to increase their territorial competitiveness, which is essential for cities to success. The paper aims to prove the role of the smart city to increase the territorial competitiveness of five cities namely, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Cairo, and Rabat. These cities are affected by the political disturbances in the Arab world despite that; they try to build smart cities (through many projects) to face a global challenge of cities. Dubai is the smartest territorially competitive, all the five cities increase their indicators of competitiveness with a large difference between cities that exist in Asia and Africa while all of them are still delayed in the capacity to innovate.