Intelligent city

The term intelligent city (IC) has been used with various meanings. At least five different descriptions of what an intelligent city is can be found in the literature:

1. ICs have been frequently defined as virtual reconstructions of cities, as virtual cities (Droege, 1997).. The term has been used interchangeably as an equivalent of ‘digital city’, ‘information city’, ‘wired city’, ‘telecity’, ‘knowledge-based city’, ‘electronic communities’, ‘electronic community spaces’, ‘flexicity’, ‘teletopia’, ‘cyberville’, covering a wide range of electronic and digital applications related to digital spaces of communities and cities (MIMOS).
2. Another meaning was given by the World Foundation for Smart Communities, which links digital cities with smart growth, a development based on information and commnication technologies. ‘A Smart Community is a community that has made a conscious effort to use information technology to transform life and work within its region in significant and fundamental, rather than incremental, ways’ (California Institute for Smart Communities, 2001).
3. ICs are defined as intelligent environments with embedded information and communication technologies creating interactive spaces that bring computation into the physical world. From this perspective, intelligent cities (or intelligent spaces more generally) refer to physical environments in which information and communication technologies and sensor systems disappear as they become embedded into physical objects and the surroundings in which we live, travel, and work (Steventon and Wright, 2006).
4. Intelligent cities are also defined as territories that bring innovation systems and ICTs within the same locality. The Intelligent Community Forum (2006) has developed a list of indicators that provide a framework for understanding how communities and regions can gain a competitive edge in today’s Broadband Economy. Being an IC it takes a combination of: (1) significant deployment of broadband communications to businesses, government facilities and residences; (2) effective education, training and workforce able to perform knowledge work; (3) policies and programs that promote digital democracy by bridging the digital divide to ensure that all sectors of the society and citizens benefit from the broadband revolution; (4) innovation in the public and private sectors and efforts to create economic clusters and risk capital to fund the development of new businesses; and (5) effective economic development marketing that leverages the community’s broadband to attract talented employment and investments.
5. Along the same line, intelligent cities (communities, clusters, regions) are those territories characterized by high capacity for learning and innovation, which is built-in the creativity of their population, their institutions of knowledge creation, and their digital infrastructure for communication and knowledge management. The distinctive characteristic of intelligent cities is the increased performance in the field of innovation, because innovation and solving of new problems are distinctive features of intelligence (komninos 2002 and 2006).

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.

Their 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: ‘the capacity of human communities to co-operate intellectually in creation, innovation and invention’; ‘the collective learning and creative process realised through exchanges of knowledge and intellectual creativity’; ‘the capability for a group to organise itself in order to decide upon its own future and control the means to attain it in complex contexts’ (Atlee 2004). 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 public 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.

Intelligent cities – digital cities – intelligent environments

An important issue in understanding intelligent cities is to describe their differences from other forms of digital spaces, namely the‘digital city’ and ‘intelligent environments’.

All intelligent cities are digital cities as well, but all digital cities are not intelligent (Komninos 2002, 195-201). The difference is in the problem solving capability of intelligent cities, while the ability of digital cities is in the provision of existing services via digital communication. Take the following example: (1) the administration of a city (or a local community) offers online (via its web portal) the services that already is proving to its citizens /members. This is a typical case of digital city. (2) The administration of a city (or a community) creates new services to the citizens using digital spaces of consultation and online collaboration tools. This is a typical intelligent city. In the second case, the digital space becomes tool that contributes to the capacity of the administration / community to employ collective intelligence and find new solutions to a problem.

As general rule, we may say that digital cities are placed downstream between the public authority and the citizens as recipients of services (as digital marketplaces); while intelligent cities are placed upstream between the public authority and the citizens as co-creators of new services (as Living lab). This view explains why the main building blocks of intelligent cities are related to competitive intelligence, technology absorption, collaborative product development, and new product promotion strategies.

Intelligent environments are digital spaces in which the digital interaction goes out of the computer and becomes embedded into the buildings and infrastructure of the city. Intelligent environments can be combined both to digital cities, automating the delivery chain of services, and to intelligent cities as well, automating the collection and processing of information along the new product / service development process.

Intelligent cities and globalization

Recent publications on intelligent cities stress the convergence of innovation systems and virtual environments in creating global systems of innovation (Bell et al. 2009; Komninos 2008; IJIRD 2009). As open innovation theory came to show, the emphasis has now shifted from the internal in the company innovation process to external innovation networks and knowledge environments, which have now taken on global dimensions. Virtual spaces and embedded systems are generating a wave of new hybrid environments (global digital ecosystems, living labs, i-hubs, COINs, smart cities, e-gov,digital cities, u-communities, intelligent environments, etc.) which amplify networking, experimentation and innovation on a global scale.