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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.

Our summary today works with the article titled Smart communities initiatives from 2004 by Helena Lindskog presented at the 3rd ISOneWorld Conference, 2004. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see different smart community approaches. This article compares these different approaches and presents how the co-operation between countries, regions and smart communities functions.

Information and Communication Technology, abbreviated to ICT influences all aspects of life, relationships and development. It is obvious and clear for everybody that ICT has fundamentally changed and is still changing the conditions of living, communicating and working as well as for producing and distributing knowledge. Communities around the world are responding to the needs of their citizens by discovering new ways of using ICT for economic, social and cultural development. Companies and governments that take advantage of these new technologies will create jobs and economic growth as well as improve the overall quality of life within the communities in which they take part.

The term smart community is generic and gives direct associations towards optimal, positive and sustainable development of a town, city or region. There are several ways to define what the smart community concept means from different institutes, such as the California Institute for Smart Communities in 1997 at San Diego State University, the Panel on Smart Communities from the Industry Canada in 1998, or the Smart Community International Network from 2003.The smart community in summary has a holistic view and tried to incorporate all the possible aspects and parts involved outgoing from a geographically limited area such as a town, city or region and their citizens. This concept sets the community and citizens’ needs in focus.

It is not enough for a community to offer jobs, space for enterprises or beautiful surroundings in order to be attractive and sustainable for the citizens and enterprises. A smart community also has the understanding of all the parties involved and combine the efforts to achieve the best results. The smart community concept stresses the importance of collaboration, cooperation and partnership between all parties involved including public institutions, private sector, voluntary organisations, schools and citizens.

ICT is used as a tool. A well-functioning infrastructure is absolutely necessary but not enough to become a smart community. In addition, it is necessary to concentrate on ICT applications such as e-voting, e-learning and e-commerce for all the important aspects of the community’s activities. The ICT and its applications are there to facilitate the involvement of all parties in the development of the community. They are prerequisites but without real engagement and willingness to collaborate and cooperate between public institutions, private sector, voluntary organisations, schools and citizens, there is no smart community.

The smart community concept is known and used all over the world under different names and circumstances. There are local, regional and national initiatives, or even international programs like of the European Union. The US regions and cities decide themselves to start a smart community movement with a clear understanding of the importance of local initiatives and a bottom-up approach, started first with California in 1993. The Canadian government adopted the top-down approach in the most consequent way and implemented the concept of smart communities as a governmental program, as a pillar to Canada’s national Connectedness Agenda. Australia’s first smart communities emerged between 1994 and 98 and reflected the gradual space and limitations of dial up access to narrow band internet services, while afterwards, there has been a substantial increase in smart community development for creating network connectivity.

There were and are several programs within the European Union that could be defined as a type of smart community programs even if the smart community term is not always used, such as Eurocities, Telecities, Global Cities Dialogue or the Stockholm Challenge Award. What characterise Europe is a collaboration and exchange of experiences in a European level. There are also in most of the European countries similar national and regional projects but it is on the European level that the European Union has taken the lead for coordination and collaboration between different towns, cities and regions above the national level.

Beside the European Union, the Smart Community International Network, abbreviated to SCIN was founded in 2003 by four communities as a multilateral organisation. The four communities are the City of Stockholm from Sweden, Kenniswijk from the Netherlands, City of Ottawa from Canada, and the Multimedia Super Corridor from Malaysia. The aim of SCIN is to promote, facilitate and institutionalise cooperation by means of exchange, best practice programs, business development, missions, benchmarking tools and joint project implementation.

Additionally, there are local initiatives, like in the town of Tranas in Sweden. It is a good illustration of a typical development towards becoming a smart community. The smart community concept was introduced already in 1998 and in the year 200 a decision was made to adopt a strategy based on the smart community concept for the usage of broadband infrastructure for applications and services for the best of the community inhabitants and businesses in all their activities, including contacts with authorities, other businesses, schools or any other activity. Tranas made early efforts to build a municipal area network in order to enhance and make the local administration more efficient as well as to include the local industry in a co-operative project. The vision was that broadband was a means to support the town to become a smart community, a better place to live for citizens and more competitive for future developments. Their strategy was based on collaboration and four pillars: security, democracy, solidarity and belief in the future.

Due to their efforts, Tranas is not only emerging from a severe economic decline and depopulation but also becoming a well-known point on the map in Sweden and internationally. Among other things, it is a member of the EU’s organisation of Telecities and co-operates with other cities in high education programs. In 2001, Tranas was awarded a first price as the best community in the country in introducing computer driving permits.

Every smart community is unique because its characteristics are based on the community itself. One common denominator is that successful smart communities are the result of a coalition of business, education, government and individual citizens. A successful smart community can be built from the top-down or bottom-up, but active involvement from every sector of the community is essential. This united effort creates synergy which allows individual projects to build upon each other for faster progress, resulting in the involved, informed and trained critical mass necessary for transformation of how the entire community carries out its work.

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

1. There are many different smart community definitions and established smart communities will differ from one another based on the communities themselves, but cooperation among the different agents of the community is required.
2. Smart community initiatives can be established from the bottom-up or top-down, but active involvement is essential from the whole community.
3. Smart communities can use ICTs as tools and facilitators but these tools must be in the service of creating better quality of life for the community itself.

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

1. Why is technology and ICT a prerequisite of becoming a smart community? Is there smartness without technology?
2. How have the smart community concepts and requirements change in the last almost 20 years since the article? Have we utilised the concepts to their maximum or are the ideas left over which we need to address and use?
3. How smart is your community in your neighbourhood?
4. Are you actively involved in your community to make it smarter?

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