Leonidas Anthopoulos and Panos Fitsilis
interesting, since many smart city cases – i. e., Amsterdam and Barcelona‐ have changed their approaches even more than twice. and questions rise regarding the reasons that lied behind this change. The third question seeks for answers regarding whether the evolution of smart city approaches is logical and based on technological evolution or it concerns strategic choices and priorities’ update.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows: in the following background section 2 a classification of different smart city approaches is performed. Moreover, representative city cases for each approach are extracted and the evolution of these cases is presented. Then, section 3 structures smart city evolution roadmaps according to the provided e‐services. In section 4 this paper’ s questions are discussed according to the extracted outcomes. Finally, in section 5 some conclusions and some future thoughts are given.
2. Background
In this section, a bibliographic review on smart city is performed and many cities appear to follow alternative approaches. Authors combined literature findings with information from the official websites of the extracted cases in order to explore the current condition of the identified cases( Table 1).
According to( Giffinger et al., 2007) the term smart city is not used in a holistic way describing a city with certain attributes, but is used for various aspects which range from mesh metropolitan ICT environments to a city regarding the education( or smartness) of its inhabitants( Giffinger et al., 2007),( Komninos, 2002). Smart city was originally introduced in the Australian cases of Brisbane and Blacksbourg where the ICT supported social participation, narrowness of the digital divide and accessibility to public information and services. Smart City was later evolved to( a) urban spaces for business opportunities, which was followed by the city network of Malta, Dubai and Kochi( www. smartcity. ae); and to( b) ubiquitous technologies installed across the city, which are integrated into everyday objects and activities.
Moreover, smart city has been approached as part of the broader term of digital city by( Anthopoulos and Tsoukalas, 2006), where a generic multi‐tier common architecture for digital cities was introduced and assigned smart city to the software and services layer of this architecture. For the purposes of this article, the term smart city will refer to all alternative approaches to metropolitan ICT cases.
An investigative literature review returns eight( 8) different smart city approaches and 31 representative city cases, which have evolved since the early‘ 90s and faced different challenges. Web or Virtual City is the primary smart city form with representatives the America‐On‐Line( AOL) cities( Wang and Wu, 2001), the digital city of Kyoto( Ishida, 2002),( Ishida et al., 2010) and the digital city of Amsterdam( Lieshout, 2001). This approach concerns web environments, which offer local information, online chatting and meeting rooms, and a city’ s virtual simulation.
The second approach is the Knowledge Bases, which was adopted by Copenhagen and then ex‐industrial area of Craigmillar( Edinburgh, Scotland)( Van Bastelaer, 1998). Copenhagen developed a public database entitled Copenhagen Base, which had crowd sourcing options, it delivered local information and it was accessible via the Internet and via text‐TV. The case of Craigmillar concerns a Community Information Service, which capitalized the ICT to structure groups of citizens who shared knowledge and collaborated to deal with unemployment and with other local needs.
The city of Seoul introduced the third approach entitled Broadband City / Broadband Metropolis, where fiber optic backbones were installed in the city and enabled the interconnection of households and of local enterprises to ultra‐high speed networks( Townsend, 2007). Last mile connections to the backbone were established with fiber optic channels( Fiber‐to‐the‐Home, FTTH), composing a flourish environment for telecommunication vendors and for private investments in general. Other cities that can be classified in this category is Beijing( China)( Sairamesh et al. 2004), Antwerp( Belgium), Helsinki, Amsterdam and Geneva( Van Bastelaer, 1998). Antwerp and Amsterdam collaborated and interconnected their broadband networks.
Another approach is the Mobile or Wireless or Ambient Cities, with representatives New York City and Atlanta( Ganapati and Schoepp, 2008) ‐, which installed wireless broadband networks in the city, accessible( with or without charge) by its inhabitants.
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