Intelligent cities

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:

# ICs have been frequently defined as virtual reconstructions of cities, as virtual cities (Droege, 1997). [Droege, P. (ed.), (1997) Intelligent Environments - Spatial Aspect of the Information Revolution, Oxford, Elsevier.] . 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).
# 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). [California Institute for Smart Communities, (2001) [http://www.smartcommunities.org/library_10steps.htm "Ten Steps to Becoming a Smart Community"] .]
# 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). [Steventon, A., and Wright, S. (eds), (2006) "Intelligent spaces: The application of pervasive ICT", London, Springer.]
# Intelligent cities are also defined as territories that bring innovation systems and ICTs within the same locality. The Intelligent Community Forum (2006) [Intelligent Community Forum, (2006) [http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=18 "What is an Intelligent Community"] .] 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.
# 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 [Komninos, N. (2002) "Intelligent Cities: Innovation, knowledge systems and digital spaces", London and New York, Routledge.] and 2006 [Komninos, N. (2006) [http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=IEECPS0020060CP5180v1-13000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes "The Architecture of Intelligent Cities"] , Conference Proceedings Intelligent Environments 06, Institution of Engineering and Technology, pp. 53-61.] ).

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) [Florida, R. (2002) "The Rise of the Creative Class and how It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life", New York: Basic Books.] 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). [Atlee, T. (2004) [http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/archives/000288.html#more "Definitions of Collective Intelligence"] , Blog of Collective Intelligence.] 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.

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