Intelligent City

Intelligent City

The term intelligent city (IC) has been used with various meanings. At least five different descriptions of what an intelligent city is can be found in the literature:

1. Initially ICs have been defined as virtual reconstructions of cities, as virtual cities (Droege, 1997). The term has been used broadly as an equivalent of ‘digital city’, ‘information city’, ‘wired city’, ‘telecity’, ‘knowledge-based city’, ‘electronic communities’, ‘electronic community spaces’, ‘flexicity’, ‘teletopia’, ‘cyberville’, covering a wide range of electronic and digital applications related to digital spaces of communities and cities (MIMOS).
2. Another meaning was given by the World Foundation for Smart Communities, which links smart cities with smart growth, a development based on information and communication technologies. ‘A Smart Community is a community that has made a conscious effort to use information technology to transform life and work within its region in significant and fundamental, rather than incremental, ways’ (California Institute for Smart Communities, 2001).
3. ICs were defined as intelligent environments with embedded information and communication technologies creating interactive spaces that bring computation into the physical world. From this perspective, intelligent cities (or intelligent spaces more generally) refer to physical environments in which information and communication technologies and sensor systems disappear as they become embedded into physical objects and the surroundings in which we live, travel, and work (Steventon and Wright, 2006).
4. Intelligent cities were also defined as territories that bring innovation and ICTs within the same locality. The Intelligent Community Forum (2006) has developed a list of indicators that provide a framework for understanding how communities and regions can gain a competitive edge in today’s Broadband Economy. Being an IC it takes a combination of: (1) significant deployment of broadband communications to businesses, government facilities and residences; (2) effective education, training and workforce able to perform knowledge work; (3) policies and programs that promote digital democracy by bridging the digital divide to ensure that all sectors of the society and citizens benefit from the broadband revolution; (4) innovation in the public and private sectors and efforts to create economic clusters and risk capital to fund the development of new businesses; and (5) effective economic development marketing that leverages the community’s broadband to attract talented employment and investments.
5. Along the same line, intelligent cities (communities, clusters, regions) were defined as multi-layer territorial systems of innovation that bring together knowledge-intensive activities, institutions for cooperation in learning and innovation, and digital spaces for communication and interaction in order to maximize the problem-solving capability of the city. The distinctive characteristic of an intelligent city is the high performance in the field of innovation, because innovation and solving of new problems are main features of intelligence (Komninos 2002 and 2006).