Evolution Roadmaps for Smart Cities: Determining Viable Paths
Leonidas Anthopoulos and Panos Fitsilis Technological Education Institute( TEI) of Larissa, Larissa, Greece lanthopo @ teilar. gr fitsilis @ teilar. gr
Abstract: Smart cities have emerged for more than twenty years from their primary website form to modern ubiquitous and environmental sensitive ones and they encounter an extensive number of representative cases, with an international spread. Today they are considered living labs, areas of smart growth and favorable e‐Government environments, while they structure a modern and globalized market with a raising and competitive industry. Various alternative approaches to smart city can be observed, which appeared and have evolved during this timeline. These approaches have attracted various and significant cases, which either evolved to other forms or they later declined. This paper recognizes these different smart city approaches and their evolution, and it seeks to answer the following questions: what different approaches to smart city exist or have existed? How have the smart cities evolved? Do particular evolution roadmaps exist for smart cities? In order to answer these questions, this paper presents a worldwide smart city classification, which describes all the alternative approaches that appear in literature and determines representative city cases together with similarities and differences among these approaches. Literature review is combined with data from an investigation of the official websites of the representative cases, which returns groups of e‐services that are being offered by different smart city approaches. These e‐service groups are used to identify evolution roadmaps for smart city that can show how smart cities have emerged and to which particular directions are being evolved. The evolution roadmaps are depicted via technology roadmapping tool. Moreover, these roadmaps can become a useful tool for municipal decision makers, who have to choose between evolution forms and smart city projects that secure smart city’ s viability. Viability is a crucial parameter for every project, especially due to recent financial recession, since smart cities concern extensive and demanding investments, which affect large communities and local life in a significant manner.
Keywords: smart cities, technology roadmapping, e‐Government, digital cities, e‐services, geographies, ubiquitous technologies
1. Introduction
Various terms have been used to describe the application of the Information and Communications Technologies( ICT) and the deployment of various e‐services in the urban areas( Anthopoulos and Vakali, 2012): web or virtual, broadband, wireless or mobile, digital, smart and ubiquitous cities are only some of these terms. Moreover, terms such as knowledge spaces, virtual or digital communities extend the physical urban limits and describe groups of citizens who distantly share virtual spaces for a common reason.
No commonly agreed“ umbrella” term can be found in the literature to describe this“ booming” phenomenon of the abovementioned metropolitan ICT environments, while the digital city and the smart city ones are the most usual. For the purposes of this paper the term smart city will be used to describe all these alternative terms. Smart cities are crucial because, they deal with important state‐of‐the‐art topics i. e., e‐Government service delivery, e‐service adoption, smart growth, social networking, living labs etc.
Various cities around the world have approached the smart city. Each of them usually faced different challenges and prioritized alternative objectives, such as improvement of local everyday life; development of knowledge‐based societies; narrowness of the digital divide; and promotion of e‐Government locally( Anthopoulos and Vakali, 2012). Others emphasized on the enhancement of e‐commerce services and on local growth, while recently the environmental protection has been put first on the objectives’ list.
The implementation of a smart city is based on sets of projects, which address these predefined priorities and objectives. However, these various smart city cases did not keep their initial forms and they have updated – even more than once‐ to different directions and objectives, a fact that questions the strategic purposes, the effectiveness and the viability of a smart city.
This paper tries to answer the following questions: what different approaches to smart city exist or have existed? How have the smart cities evolved? Do particular evolution roadmaps exist for smart cities? The first question sounds simple, but the appearance of so many different terms that describe the same phenomenon can be confused and the similarities and differences have to be specified. The second question is very
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