The Smart City Evolution

The smart city concept started appearing in time with different terms and perspectives as a means to define urban technological evolution. More specifically, smart city was not the initial term that was used by scholars. Instead, scholars in late 1990s started discussing about city and ICT from different perspectives and with the use of different terms, in their attempts to describe ICT project initiation within the urban space or the utilisation of the ICT to treat local needs First evidence regarding smart city appears in literature in 1997 (Graham and Aurigi 1997), where it is claimed that over 2000 virtual cities and urban web pages existed in 1997, which introduced the term web or virtual city in an attempt to describe local ICT network initiatives, which enabled the development of local cyber-based (virtual) communities (decentralised, interactive, one-to-one and one-to-many media networks). Virtual cities were based on the World Wide Web (WWW) and they operated as electronic analogies for the real, material, urban areas that host them. The promise of virtual cities was to develop new interactive “public-arenas”, especially in cities where the lack of public space, the growing violence, fear alienation and the reduction in civic associations do not enable public interaction, but instead they enhance “urban privatism”. Web or Virtual cities drew together all web activities in a city or simulated a city on the web and they were configured as little more than urban databases that provided public information for the municipal authorities to even transport and leisure data, cultural events and tourist guides. Virtual cities concerned the first attempt that utilised the potential of the Internet for supporting local democracy and enabled urban marketing, new types of electronic municipal service delivery, local inter-firm networking, and social and community development within cities. However, an absence of citizens was documented, whose feedback was supposed to be necessary to establish. The same work (Graham and Aurigi 1997) introduced the term digital city too, which was a more socially inclusive and discourse driven virtual city. In this respect, the first forms of digital cities included thematic spaces for citizen interactions. Digital city was mentioned in the second work, only a year later by van den Besselaar and Beckers (1998), who named the term as a large infrastructure for virtual communities. Communities concern associations between people, which are coordinated through communication based on shared norms and interests. The above definition demonstrates that digital city is a broader term, compared to community networks, since digital city’s scope is wider (it is not focused on a specific urban space) and it can deliver services to non-community members that would like to register them. Moreover, this work mentioned the Internet-enabled community structure that exceeds the physical space, which limits locality. Instead, local communities are the ones that share common interests (special interest groups). The first digital city practice was implemented in Amsterdam1 in 1994 as the result from an activists’ effort, with the aim to enable dialogue between community and politicians. It was a success story since the citizens adopted progressively the effort, while it was accompanied by the implication of stimulating Internet penetration in the city. The above evidence shows that both virtual and digital smart city types initiated an approach to handle similar challenges with similar technological means: they aimed to create communities with the use of the ICT in an attempt to socialize inhabitants, to democratize local governments and to utilize virtual places against the lack of public space. In this respect, the Internet, combined with urban network infrastructure and the WWW were used to develop city websites, which offered alternative smart services mainly regarding information retrieval (e.g., city guides, information for transportation, government political information’s and forms’ sharing, employment opportunities etc.), synchronous (chatting, debates and gaming) and asynchronous communication (e-mail, discussion groups and billboards). These two initial smart city approaches simulated the urban space either as connected islands of communities (community of communities) or even as two-dimension (2D) or three-dimension (3D) virtual spaces.