Smart Cities

Abstract

This article summarizes the vast literature on the concept of Smart City. The concept is first framed in the existing urban economics literature and the ongoing urbanization trends. The article, then, reviews the history of the Smart City concept from its inception, as mostly focusing on information and communication technology endowments as means to foster urban performance, toward the more recent approach based on the concentration of human capital in cities, to, finally, the necessary urban conditions leading to the fast adoption and wise exploitation of e-technologies. Next, the article summarizes the various methodologies and procedures followed in the literature to rank cities according to their degree of smartness. This vast literature is classified in terms of the characteristics pinpointed as major drivers of urban smartness in each work. Finally, the article concludes with a critical review of the Smart City policies drawn by various policy institutions, from the supranational (mainly, EU) to the local administrative level.

Cultural Heritage in Smart City Environments

“…One of the distinctive characteristics of smart cities is the central role of technology as a means for accumulating, organising and making vast amounts of information accessible to an increasing number of people (Angelidou, 2016). This results to a technologically-enabled ecosystem which yields improvements on the city's functions, enhancing environmental sustainability and rendering the city 'smart' (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011;Angelidou, 2015;Caragliu et al, 2009;Tranos and Gertner, 2012).…”

Four European Smart City Strategies

“…Public authorities can make better-informed and documented decisions and solve problems successfully, while the city"s populace can access efficient and high-end services in the domains of economic activity, governance, quality of life and utility management (Komninos, 2011a;Komninos, 2011b;Schaffers et al, 2011). This technologically-enabled ecosystem yields improvements of a city"s functions, enhancing environmental sustainability and rendering the city "smart" (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011;Caragliu et al, 2009;Tranos and Gertner, 2012;Angelidou, 2014).…”

“…They aim to forge business-friendly environments offering advanced services to businesses and entrepreneurs. They also claim to nurture the development of highly professional entrepreneurial environments, providing the ideal preconditions for businesses to prosper, innovate and network (Caragliu et al, 2009;Hollands, 2008;Tranos and Gertner, 2012). Furthermore, in the EU"s current policy framework, RIS3 strategies for smart specialization call, among others, entrepreneurial actors to explore opportunities in existing or new sectors and experiment with new activities, to pin-point the most promising areas for future regional development (Foray et al, 2012).…”

“…In parallel, smart city programs provide platforms for engaging citizens and stakeholders and assessing the viability of smart city solutions and services in real-life contexts (Carter et al, 2011;Bria, 2012;Gonzá lez and Rossi, 2012). Overall, the city benefits widely from localized knowledge spillovers, collective intelligence functions and the development of inclusive communities that confront the challenges and grasp the opportunities of the rising digital economy (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011;Caragliu et al, 2009;Tranos and Gertner, 2012;Hollands, 2008;Angelidou et al, 2012;Angelidou, 2014).…”

Modeling and evaluating the sustainability of smart solutions

“…While this metaphor has been turned into daily reality in some cases -such as the smart label 1 and the smartphone -others are still far from everyday practice, such as smart grids (as defined in EFC, 2003), smart cities (as defined in Caragliu et al, 2009, see also Kramers et al, in this issue), or smart sensor networks (as described in Weber, 2009). …”