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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

So, this research episode is working with a 2014 book chapter about an investigation into the smart city literature. This chapter gives us an insight into the smart cities’ history since its infancy, and its conneting urban future concepts, through time analysis, terminology analysis, definition analysis, typology analysis and geographic analysis.

Our summary today works with the chapter titled Smart and digital city: A systematic literature review from 2014 by Annalisa Cocchia. The chapter is part of the book titled Smart city – How to create public and economic value with high technology in urban space, published by Springer. The chapter follows the smart city concept’s evolution from 1993 until 2012 and its connections to other urban future concepts, such as the intelligent city, the knowledge city, the ubiquitous city, the sustainable city and the digital city.

Before jumping into the chapter, the systematic literature review is worth to be explained. A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources, articles and chapters and books, on a specific topic. A systematic literature review is a basic scientific activity that allows researchers and scientists to view the lay of the land in a particular area. A systematic literature review identifies, selectes and synthesizes research results to create a summary of current evidence. The systematic review should follow a clearly defined protocol and must be transparent through multiple databases. The systematic literature review is useful to understand the overall landscape of a topic, to identify gaps in the given literature, and to identify questions for further research. Now, after we cleared up the main form of the chapter, let’s dive in to the contents.

Cocchia starts with the two important phenomena of the last years of the 20^th century: urbanisation and information and communication technologies highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of such trajectories. From the interational context for achieving the Kyoto Protocol’s aims, the smart city concept was born which labelled initiatives as smart relevant to urban sustainability. This gave birth to a very broad and ambiguous range of smart meanings – and at the time of writing, the comprehensive definition for smart city was far to be done. Cocchia also highlighted that smart city was frequently mixed up with terms like wired city, knowledge city, green city, and especially, digital city. The aim of this investigation was to light the similarities and differences between smart and digital city looking at a sound definition of both.

To achieve this aim, the investigation started with the beginnings of smart city and digital city in 1993 until 2012. To examine the collected data, the following 5 analysis were proposed:

1. Time analysis with the question how and when smart city and digital city concepts were born?
2. Terminology analysis with the question Which events mainly influenced the development of smart city and digital city ideas?
3. Definition analysis with the question Which are the main shared features, differences and overlaps between smart city and digital city contents?
4. Typology analysis with the question Are smart city and ditigal city included into a comprehensive urban strategy?
5. Geographical  analysis with the question How these two types of city strategies are widespread in the world?

After the introduction, the methods are identified, as it should be with a systematic literature review. Cocchia used the methodological model proposed by Vom Brocke at al in their study with a five phases framework:

1. Definition of the review scope,
2. Conceptualisation of topic,
3. Literature search,
4. Literature analysis and synthesis,
5. Research agenda.

Although the steps are highly impressive, let’s jump to the fifth, the set research agenda. The final purpose of this literature review, including 705 papers, is not only to clarify the similarities and differences between smart city and digital city, or to find a good definition to identify both of them, but also to result in a new research agenda, which should be more insightful than the research question posed at the beginning.

Time analysis had two purposes: to analyse the time trend and distribution of researches regarding smart cities and digital cities and to understand which are the main determinant of this time trend. The investigated time frame was from 1993 to 2012. The first study regarding smart cities and digital cities appeared in 1994. From 1997, a year characterised by the Kyoto Protocol, there was a gradual increase until 2005. In 2000, the internet was beginning to be widespread and so the ICT infrastructure, while in 2005 the Kyoto Protocol entered in force. Between 2006 and 2009 was a steady increase, during which time, IBM endorsed the Smart Planet concept and the Covenant of Mayors in Europe was established in 2008. From 2010, as the EU launched its Europe 2020 Strategy, the growth doubled each year until 2012. As it can be seen from the links, there are influences from technology and policy to the smart and digital researches. Therefore, both smart city and digital city strategies are the effect of technology advancements and environmental sustainability.

Terminology analysis aimed to separate the papers regarding smart cities and digital cities, and they turned out to have very different trends over the year. Digital city was conceived and developed in the nineties with the development of the internet and its adoption to everyday urban life. Smart city was born in 1994, but papers are few until 2010 when the EU started to use ‘smart’ to qualify sustainability projects and actions in the urban space. The digital city was more popular in the 90s, Digital City Amsterdam was born in 1994 giving more traction to the term. Additionally, 2000 was the year the internet was widespread also highlighting the digital city term with ICTs. Regarding smart city, 2005 was a critical year with Kyoto Protocol entering place, 2007 with Apple launching the first smart phone, and 2010 with the EU’s Europe 2020 Strategy. Both concepts were developed in the 90s, both are highly influenced by external drivers. And though they are used interchangeably, they are quite different: digital city regards the use of ICT in urban areas, smart city regards the attention to be paid to the environmental quality in cities, and digital city is a free trend emerging from the daily use of technology, while smart city is rather a political trend.

Definition analysis is for comparing the most cited definitions to understand the similarities and differences. While in the EU definition for smart city the environmental goals are evermore present, the academic definitions are more focused on the quality of life of people and community. The digital city embodies the crucial step of virtualisation (transforming the material city into a virtual city) to create a new tangible urban dimension to build a smarter community. This difference probably derives from the important but different role of the ICT in the concepts: digital city is based on ICT, smart city has ICT but with other aspects together. This analysis discloses a wide range of meanings associated with a smart city, including environmental, social and digital components.

Typology analysis aimed to separate theoretical papers from empirical papers to understand whether the concepts are mainly theoretical or there are concrete implementations. 64% of the investigated papers worked with theoretical approaches, and 36% were case study analysis. The first decade of both concepts were more empirical, maybe because the first steps of both concepts seems to be from the bottom-up, cities or other agents starting to implement initiatives without a comprehensive strategy. From these empirical case studies, the central role of technological and innovative solutions emerges for the smart or digital city implementations. Therefore, it can be said, that both developments are largely based on innovative technologies to urban projects. Meaning, that the ideas were mainly technology driven instead of policy driven. The origin of smart implementations of different innovative technologies explains therefore why a shared definition of smart city still lacks.

Geographic analysis was conducted to discover where all over the world smart and digital city strategies and projects have been implemented, evidencing geographical areas more interested in smart themes and cities that are considered pilot cases worldwide. From the 705 papers, 165 were case studies. This part of the research showed, that there are macro-clusters of smart and digital cities both in Asia and Europe, most of the case studies originating from these two regions. And there were different reasons to implement smart or digital city strategies, such as to attract foreign investment promoting local advantage and improve cultural economic and social development, to enable service delivery and economic development, to enable the transition to a knowledge economy, all with the help of new technologies.

Regarding the definition of both smart city and digital city, a shared and acknowledged definition of both still lacks. Digital city definitions are more concentrated on the key role of ICT in improving the quality of services and information supplied to citizens. Smart city defintions are more different, mainly because the purpose of a smart city is often too large: to improve the quality of urban life – everything counts! The shared smart city features include the role of innovation and technology, the environmental requirements, the economic and social development. In the last few years, with the inclusion of the ICT into the smart city concept, digital city seems to be becoming a subset of the smart city.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. A thorough systematic literature review was not able to find a matching description for smart city, or the digital city; and that the latter could be part of the former.
2. From the beginning, based on this systematic review, smart city was more than just a technologically advanced city, it was born for environmental purposes.
3. And The origin of these concepts are bottom-up, they originated from smaller entities and individuals taking action in implementing ideas in urban areas.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Why it is important to have a matching definition based on the investigation?
2. Can the geographical differences be accounted for the different definitions? At different places of the worlds, there are different cultures, requirements, demographies, peoples, etc, and maybe those are responsible to create a specific smart city for their own future.

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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