Intelligent City - Intelligent Cities Vs.digital Cities

Intelligent Cities Vs.digital Cities

An important issue in understanding intelligent cities is to describe their differences from other forms of digital spaces, namely the‘digital city’ and ‘intelligent environments’.

All intelligent cities are digital cities, but all digital cities are not intelligent (Komninos 2002, 195-201). The difference is in the problem solving capability of intelligent cities, while the ability of digital cities is in the provision of services via digital communication. Take the following examples: (1) the administration of a city -or a local community- offers online (via its web portal) services that already was providing offline. This is a typical case of digital city offering online services for the citizen. (2) A group of people /organizations creates new products / services using digital spaces of consultation and online collaboration among the citizens. This is a typical case of intelligent city creating services with the involvement of citizens (by the citizens). In the second case, the digital space becomes a tool that contributes to the capacity of the community to use collective intelligence and engineer new solutions to people needs.

As general rule, we may say that in services provision by local administrations, digital cities are placed downstream between the public authority and the citizen as recipient of services (as digital marketplaces); while intelligent cities are placed upstream between the citizens and the public authority, enabling co-creation and co-design of services (as Living lab). This view explains why the main building blocks of intelligent cities are related to innovation and problem solving processes, such as competitive intelligence, technology absorption, collaborative product development, and new product promotion.

Intelligent environments are digital spaces in which the digital interaction goes out of the computer and becomes embedded into buildings and infrastructures of the city. Intelligent environments can be combined both to digital cities, automating the delivery of services, and to intelligent cities as well, automating the collection and processing of information along new product / service development.