The COVID-19 crisis has tested the preparedness of cities across the globe. Confronting the challenges, how cities respond to this crisis to maintain economic resilience has attracted much attention. To situate smart city in evolutionary economic geography and stretch it toward the agile innovation model, this study examines what smart city actually do better. We explored the initial COVID-19 response process in the city of Daegu, South Korea as the model of a smart city. We demonstrated that ‘smartness’ of a city is established from the cumulative outcomes of layered experiences rather than constructed from scratch. This research contributes to expanding the scope of urban resilience literature through the agile model, as a part of the evolution approach, which builds a region’s competitiveness backed up and accelerated by urban ICT infrastructures.