Intelligent City - The Three Dimensions of Intelligent Cities

The Three Dimensions of Intelligent Cities

Intelligent cities evolve towards a strong integration of all dimensions of human, collective, and artificial intelligence available within a city. They are constructed as multi-dimensional agglomerations combining three main dimensions (Komninos 2006, 17-18; Komninos 2008, 122-123).

• The first dimension relates to people in the city: the intelligence, inventiveness and creativity of the individuals who live and work in the city. This perspective was described by Richard Florida (2002) as ‘creative city’, gathering the values and desires of the ‘new creative class’ made by knowledge and talented people, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other creative people, which have an enormous impact on determining how the workplace is organized, whether companies will prosper, whether cities thrive or wither.

• The second dimension relates to the collective intelligence of a city’s population: ‘collective intelligence is the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration. ’ (Atlee and Pór 2006). This dimension is based on the institutions of the city that enable cooperation in knowledge and innovation.

• The third dimension relates to artificial intelligence embedded into the physical environment of the city and available to the city’s population: communication infrastructure, digital spaces, and online problem-solving tools available to the city’s population.

Thus the concept of ‘intelligent city’ integrates all the three aforementioned dimensions of the physical, institutional and digital spaces of an agglomeration. Consequently, the term ‘intelligent city’ describes a territory with (1) developed knowledge-intensive activities or clusters of such activities; (2) embedded routines of social co-operation allowing knowledge and know-how to be acquired and adapted;(3) a developed communication infrastructure, digital spaces, and knowledge / innovation management tools; and (4) a proven ability to innovate, manage and resolve problems that appear for the first time, since the capacity to innovate and to manage uncertainty are the critical factors for measuring intelligence.

Smart City is a relative concept. However, smart city research and literature seem putting more emphasis on embedded systems, sensors and interactive media, while intelligent cities rely more on collective intelligence / collaborative intelligence, innovation system, and web-based collaborative spaces. In any case both concepts try integrating the above mentioned three dimensions of urban space (physical, social, and digital).