We live in a time when everything around us is supposed to be or become smart and even smarter. “Smart” has probably become one of the most intensely used and fashionable words, as excellence, convergence or globalization. It is attached as describing attribute for people, politicians, cities, communities, universities, territories, regions, economies, states, environment, governance, mobility, development, defence, strategies, and even living. Among all these, “smart cities” seem todeal with almost all of the previous concepts, enclosing and interweaving them, as many researchers have found. (Albino et al., 2015; Caragliu et al, 2011; Deakin and Al Waer, 2011; Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2016; Herrschel, 2013; Ishkineeva et al., 2015; Meijer and Bolivar, 2015; Meijer et al, 2015; Monfaredzadeh and Berardi, 2015; Nam and Pardo, 2011; Stratigea, 2012;). From their birth (as label), around 1990, till today, smart cities are striving to clarify their identity and become better – and thus smarter. The whole process is pretty similar to the journey of a child in his quest of growing into a smart adult, with the help of parents and support from educators. How do we, as citizens – trough civic, educational and governance structures – raise smart cities, what competences do we need? This was the main question for the present exploratory essay, which was generated by several theoretical and practical experiences. The approach is mainly inductive, having its roots in the coordination of several theses on place marketing, city branding and tourism destination image, on one side, and continuing with the experience of being in the team that prepared the candidature of Iasi to the title of European Capital of Culture 2021, on another side. This inductive approach, together with a subsequent deductive one, based on a literature review, suggested that for an Eastern European city, the “eastern most” of Romania (who is, also, the eastern most EU member), growing into a smart city might require some significant catching up on specific competences which are not directly related to the main “hard” characteristics of smart cities, but rather to social and psychological, civilizational “soft” competences. The main significance of the study resides in the generation of future research hypotheses for the development of Eastern European smart cities based on a series of constructs labelled as civilizational competences.