Towards Cities as Communities

Cities should be communities that ensure high quality of life promoting effective services, sustaining knowledge acquisition and developing innovation, using technology to sustain urban growth and promote value creation. Cities becoming smart communities should adopt a smart approach to driving social and economic urban development employing information technology to promote innovation. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) help cities to achieve successful issues as smart communities within knowledge-based global and local economies and open societies. Sustaining smart growth relies on rethinking the city as a smart and sustainable community using technology to support collaboration between local government, businesses, education and research centres and people to change the city in a significant and positive way. Sustainable, inclusive and open cities should evolve as communities that use technology to support human capital value, to use knowledge sources encouraging public and private organizations to believe in cooperation for sustaining change through innovation

How to become a Smart City: Learning from Amsterdam

This exploratory study has been carried out to better understand the development process of strategies that allow large European cities to become smart. This aim is achieved through the analysis of the Amsterdam’s smart city strategy. By using case study research with a descriptive approach, the activities undertaken during the implementation of this successful initiative have been mapped and organized in a step-by-step roadmap. This made it possible to obtain a detailed description of the entire development process, useful knowledge to consider for other similar initiatives, and a conceptual framework for future comparative research. All these results will support the construction of a holistic and empirically valid theory able to explain how to build effective smart city strategies in this type of urban area