New Book Release: Understanding Smart Cities (Springer)

(Apologies for cross-posts)

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Dear Colleague, 

The new book that I authored has been released and attempts to provide with
a clear and full understanding the smart city: 

Understanding Smart Cities - A tool for Smart Government or an Industrial
Trick? Public Administration and Information Technology, Vol. 22, Springer
Science+Business Media New York, ISBN: 978-3-319-57014-3 (Print)
978-3-319-57015-0 (Online)
(https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-57015-0)

It contains the historical evolution and the cutting edge information for
smart city, research and empirical evidence from 13 smart city cases
(Trikala, Tampere, Geneva, Seoul, New Songdo, Vienna, London, Washington DC,
New York City, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Dubai and Kyoto) and findings with
regard to smart city and smart government. Is a valuable material, which was
missing from the literature.

After reading this book, the reader will succeed in gaining answers for the
following questions:

*	What is a smart city? Does it concern urban innovation or something
more complicated?
*	What is the smart city in practice? What technological artefacts are
synthesized and in which manner they collaborate in order to succeed in the
owner's mission?
*	How is the smart city market structured and does it concern an
industrial trick that leads government towards its development?
*	How the smart city -and its development- are governed and what is
the role of government in a smart city?
*	What is the smart government and how is it related with the smart
city?

This book contains five (5) chapters beyond the introduction. Chapter 2
explores the smart city theory (terminology and context), it defines several
city coalitions and organizations, it classifies cities according to their
approach and presents an architecture framework with several alternative
views to support smart city understanding. Then, chapter 3 explores the
smart city practice in terms of applied technology, services, standards and
exemplars. Chapter 4 analyzes the business terms of a smart city, via the
presentation of the alternative types of business that structure the smart
city market, while it determines the underlying smart city value and it
compares corresponding business models. Finally, it questions the potential
"smart city hoax" and differentiates city branding from marketing. Then,
chapter 5 utilizes the project and the innovation management perspectives to
demonstrate how a smart city can be developed from scratch. It shows how to
measure the existing potential of a city that can be compared with the
available technological and smart service choices and define the development
roadmap for the smart city owner. Finally, chapter 6 differentiates smart
city from smart government. It provides the term with definition and a
unified conceptual framework, which clarifies the context and the potential
of smart government, together with its interrelation with the smart city.

In brief:

Smart cities have emerged radically since their initial appearance in
literature in 1997 and they have attracted a significant scientific and
industrial attention since then. The primary smart city exemplars were able
to visualize local information -like a portal from local sources- or even to
simulate the city's landscape -like an online map-. These initial attempts
were followed by knowledge bases and networks of people, where common
knowledge was shared among the participants and they mainly concerned local
issues (e.g., employment for post-industrial areas).

All these exemplars were based on the Internet and no extra facility was
required, when cities started exploring cutting-edge infrastructure to
upgrade local information performance. In this respect, broadband and later
ultra-fast networks -wired and wireless- started being deployed in the city
and the urban space enhanced its ability to deliver several types of smart
services. Moreover, this infrastructure enabled cities to deal with several
local issues -e.g., environmental downgrading from human facilities,
transportation, aging etc.-, like waste management, intelligent
transportation, and tele-care service provision accordingly etc. This urban
upgrade with the use of technology started appearing in late 1990s and early
2000s and it was a critical milestone for the industrial engagement, which
saw extensive opportunities to grow and develop several products that range
from construction (e.g., sustainable buildings); to electronics (e.g.,
sensors for measuring internal and environmental performance, smart lighting
etc.); to engineering (e.g., transportation); to software engineering (e.g.,
smart service deployment); and even to new entrepreneurship (e.g., in data
and green economy).

This event was not accidental, since urbanization had started becoming a
reality and international reports show a significant rise of cities by 2050,
a shift that changes dramatically the role of city and of local government:
a city has to host an extensive community (like megacities do today); and
the government has to serve this community with a decreasing amount of
resources and to deal with significant challenges (e.g., poverty, climate
change and city competition etc.).

Such a potential demands a close collaboration between local governments and
the industry, while the role of the triple helix (government, university and
the industry) appears to be important. In this respect, several scholars and
practitioners suggest alternatives for such a collaboration and smart city
exemplars chose among them (e.g., Vienna has a strong collaboration with
local stakeholders; New Songdo was the outcome of a project coalition;
Masdar and other smart districts are the product of a
Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) etc.). However, the same partnership rises
criticism with regard to the open innovation character that the smart city
used to have, as well as whether the smart city is really a requirement for
governments or it is the outcome of marketing that obliges this
collaboration.

Regardless the justification of this criticism, smart city is a fact and
more and more cities either self-claim to be smart or undertake efforts to
enter this era, and a significant number of city coalitions and
organizations have been formed to handle this interest. Additionally, the
size of the smart city industry increases steadily and it is estimated to
exceed the amount of U.S. $1trillion by 2025, which justifies the private
sector's interest to develop new products and gain a share of this market.
On the other hand, almost all standardization bodies struggle to develop
standards to normalize and homogenize the developed solutions.

This reality comes in contrast to the ambiguous meaning of the terminology
that deals with smart city (e.g., the smart city itself, smart government
and smart governance etc.) and to the real concept and purpose of smart city
(e.g., does it concern a today or a tomorrow city with futuristic features
-like flying cars-?). Additionally, the role of government in smart city
development is still questioned, since its "marriage" with the private
sector might alter the vision or diverge the mission of government to deal
with the local challenges and instead to prioritize according to market's
willing (technology push).

In this regard, this book has multiple objectives. First, the aim of this
book is to clarify the smart city context and the role of government in
smart city. This book comes from the observation that the terms smart city
and smart governance are interconnected and they appear together but it is
not clear how and why. Second, this book aims to become a guide for
governments, researchers and practitioners to conceptualize and understand
what the smart city is -according to both literature and practice-, what are
the components that synthesize a smart city and what technological artefacts
can be used to serve the smart city mission. Third, it aims to provide the
readers with tools that can help them conceptualize, measure the potential,
manage the development and evaluate the outcome of a smart city project.
Fourth, it aims to serve as a didactic material for students that enter the
smart city domain and in this respect, each chapter has specific learning
outcomes and a pool of questions to support learning. As such, several
outcomes from ongoing studies, an extensive scientific material (articles,
books and reports), inputs from experts, personal experiences and city
examples are utilized to serve the above quadruple mission.

The development of this book focused on the smart city owner perspective
(the one who develops and owns the smart city outcome) and it was based on a
multi-methods approach, which combines literature reviews and reports' and
standards' analysis; narrative walks and tests in cities; interviews with
smart city representatives; panels of experts; questionnaires etc. Moreover,
several articles were published during the development of this book that are
mentioned in acknowledgements, since each chapter generated important
research questions that had to be answered. Finally, two research projects
contributed partially the development of this book, which are also mentioned
in the acknowledgements.

 

--
Dr. Leonidas Anthopoulos
Associate Professor
Business School
University of Applied Science (TEI) of Thessaly
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TEI of Thessaly, 411 10 Larissa, Greece
tel/fax: +30 2410 684570
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LinkedIn profile:  <https://linkedin.com/in/leonidasanthopoulos>
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Associate Editor, International Journal of Public Administration in the
Digital Age (IJPADA), IGI-GLOBAL