Top ten smart cities in the world. What do they have in common and how can Eastern European cities use that?

Abstract

Although the smart city concept is rather old, the literature fails in defining it properly – however, most, if not all, scholars are sharing the same idea: a main characteristic of smart cities is the use of information and communications technology in all aspects of city life. All of the actors actively involved in building a smart city (and we mention here academia, IT professionals and municipalities’ officials) are trying to build up a common definition, but until now they were not successful. However, many smart city rankings have been made by different researchers from various fields of activity. In this paper we will use the indicators that were found as being common in some of those rakings (made by prestigious institutions) in order to find the most common features of a smart city. Our intention is to suggest a model of a smart city based on the existing international experiences and to offer it for study to municipalities’ officials in Romania and other countries in the region. The main research method will be a quantitative one (based, as we have already mentioned, on the common indicators used in building international rakings), but we will use a qualitative one as well in order to highlight, as study cases, few of the most notorious examples of smart cities.