Understanding the Smart City Domain: A Literature Review

Abstract

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.