Leonidas G. Anthopoulos

Urban planning and smart cities: interrelations and reciprocities

Smart cities are emerging fast and they introduce new practices and services which highly impact policy making and planning, while they co-exist with urban facilities. It is now needed to understand the smart citys contribution in the overall urban planning and vice versa, to recognize urban planning offerings to a smart city context. This chapter highlights and measures smart city and urban planning interrelation and identifies the meeting points among them. Urban planning dimensions are drawn from the European Regional Cohesion Policy and they are associated with smart citys architecture layers.

From Digital to Ubiquitous Cities: Defining a Common Architecture for Urban Development

Digital cities have been evolved from web applications and knowledge bases to smart urban environments. This evolution has mainly been based on broadband metro-networks and complex information systems, and it suggests the form of the future city that is called wireless/smart/digital or ubiquitous city. Although common practices are being developed all over the world, different priorities are defined and different architectures are followed. In this paper we summarize on the applied architectures of multiple city case studies, we use the experiences of the digital city of Trikala, Greece, and we conclude to a common Enterprise Architecture for digital city cases. This common architecture identifies the blue prints for urban information based development. Moreover, this paper presents a common architecture for service delivery in urban spaces.

Understanding the Smart City Domain: A Literature Review

Smart cities appeared in literature in the late 1990s and various approaches have been developed so far. Until today, smart city does not describe a city with particular attributes but it is used to describe different cases in urban spaces: web portals that virtualize cities or city guides, knowledge bases that address local needs, agglomerations with information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure that attract business relocation, metropolitan-wide ICT infrastructures that deliver e-services to the citizens, ubiquitous environments, and recently ICT infrastructure for ecological use. Researchers, practicians, businessmen, and policy makers consider smart city from different perspectives and most of them agree on a model that measures urban economy, mobility, environment, living, people, and governance. On the other hand, ICT and construction industries stress to capitalize smart city and a new market seems to be generated in this domain. This chapter aims to perform a literature review, discover and classify the particular schools of thought, universities and research centres as well as companies that deal with smart city domain and discover alternative approaches, models, architectures, and frameworks with this regard.

Understanding electronic government research and smart city: A framework and empirical evidence

Smart cities have been evolving since their early appearance in late 1990s from metropolitan-wide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based solutions to today’s innovations –not necessarily based on ICTthat utilize city resources and improve local everyday life. This paper attempts to answer two research questions: (a) Does e1 Corresponding author

Interactions with e-government, new digital media and traditional channel choices: citizen-initiated factors

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the factors that can predict citizen-initiated contact with e-government as an attempt to identify important differences between service channel selections. Although more than two decades have passed since the initiation of e-government, digital channel choice is still being questioned, compared to traditional channels, and the level of selection with channels is being investigated. Design/methodology/approach – This study states three research questions that are answered through a literature review and statistical analysis of a survey in a developed country. More specifically, it identifies the factors that impact channel choice and validates them with survey results. To this end, this paper utilizes data from a national Canadian survey, where citizens empirically evaluated their channel choice – e-government, new digital media and traditional service channels – for government contacts. Findings – Statistical analysis over this data return valuable findings such as th...

From Online to Ubiquitous Cities: The Technical Transformation of Virtual Communities

Various digital city projects, from the online cases (e.g. the America on Line) to the ubiquitous cities of South Korea, have achieved in creating technically ‘physical’ areas for the virtual communities, which share knowledge of common interest. Moreover, digital cities can succeed in simplifying citizen access to public information and services. Early digital cities deliver ‘smart’ and social services to citizens even with no digital skills, closing digital divide and establishing digital areas of trust in local communities. This paper presents the evolution of the digital cities, from the web to the ubiquitous architecture. It uses the latest digital city architecture and the current conditions of the digital city of Trikala (Greece), in order to present the evolution procedure of a digital city.

A Unified Smart City Model USCM for Smart City Conceptualization and Benchmarking

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities i.e., energy, water, IoT etc., services i.e., health, education etc., governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor-various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.

Comparing Smart Cities with different modeling approaches

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and increasing interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from across the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been criticized for being influenced by vendor hype. There are various attempts to conceptualize smart cities and various benchmarking methods have been developed to evaluate their impact. In this paper the modelling and benchmarking approaches are systematically compared. There are six common dimensions among the approaches, namely people, government, economy, mobility, environment and living. This paper utilizes existing smart city analysis models in order to review three representative smart city cases and useful outcomes are extrapolated from this comparison.

Supporting the Requirements Prioritization Process Using Social Network Analysis Techniques

Requirements management and prioritization is a complex process that should take into account requirements value for customers, cost of implementation, available resources, requirements interdependencies, system architecture and dependencies to the code base. In this paper we present how Social Network Analysis can be used in order to improve software requirements management and the prioritization process. The presented model is based on meta-networks where basic entities are combined for representing requirements priorities, interdependencies, required knowledge, etc.. The analysis of the model is illustrated with sample data and a number of examples.

What is the Source of Smart City Value?: A Business Model Analysis

Smart cities have attracted an increasing international scientific and business attention and an enormous niche market is being evolved, which engages almost all the business sectors. Being engaged in the smart city market is not free-of-charge and corresponding investments are extensive, while they usually concern innovation development and always demand careful planning. However, until today it is not clear how the smart city creates value to its stakeholders or simply how profit is being created. To this end, this paper performs an investigation on the smart city business models and utilizes decision making process with the contribution of smart city experts in order to conclude on the most appropriate one. This papers findings demonstrate that business models that are followed in practice by smart cities are different to the ones suggested in literature. Moreover, the decision making processes that were followed showed that the optimal choice is the ownership business model group and from its contents preferred the Open Business Model OBM, with the Municipal-Owned-Development MOD as an alternative option.