Leonidas Anthopoulos Leonidas G. Anthopoulos

20 years after the appearance of literature evidence and the launch of the first, pioneering cases, the smart city domain remains ambiguous and generates an increasing argument with regard to its feasibility and potential. Indeed, today the smart city domain is being characterized by an emerging market that provides novel solutions for cyber-physical integration in the urban space; a competitive standardization arena that attempts to clarify the domain and homogenize these solutions; a growing network of city alliances, forums and market places that aim to bring together scientists, practitioners and city governments in an attempt to define a common urban future; and a promising international network of scholars that studies and evolves the domain. Nevertheless, a “common understanding” of what smart city is or could be missing and generates questions regarding whether a “smart utopia” - that is the outcome of the “wedding” of vendors and local governments - drives the above efforts and leaves out real community problems. The aim of this paper is to perform an analysis of 10 representative international city cases that claim to be smart. The analysis is based on a multi-method that combines literature evidence, official websites and reports, narrative city walks, and interviews with corresponding officials. The outcomes distinguish utopia from reality, introduce a pool of evidence that can justify whether a city can claim to be smart and depict a brief view of the future smart city.

Several competitive standards have been introduced for smart city quite recently, which define the architecture and its components or city key performance indicators. However, these standards do not discuss smart service formulation, nor policy making process modeling. Standardization assists in achieving process automation by introducing “best practices” as standard process models. Policy making mainly follow non-standardized procedures, even if it is supported by various tools (i.e., Multi-Criteria Decision Methods (MCDM)). Inspired by the Task-Based Modeling method (TBM) this paper focuses on policy making process standardization for smart cities. It utilizes the case-study of the InSmart (Integrative Smart City Planning) coordination action in the smart city of Trikala, Greece, in an attempt to define and introduce a model for such a process.

Evolving to a smart city has become a challenge for many cities across the globe. This transformation is a complex process, which requires a harmonized mix of policy, technology and planning since it deals with important challenges like climate change and local economic growth. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the achievement of this mix, which occurred under the purposes of the coordination action InSmart (Integrative Smart City Planning) in the smart city of Trikala, Greece. Policy making deals with city’s energy efficiency, while technology is being evaluated and planning is being performed with appropriate measurement.

Smart cities have emerged for more than twenty years from their primary website form to modern ubiquitous and environmental sensitive ones and they encounter an extensive number of representative cases, with an international spread. Today they are considered living labs, areas of smart growth and favorable e-Government environments, while they structure a modern and globalized market with a raising and competitive industry. Various alternative approaches to smart city can be observed, which appeared and have evolved during this timeline. These approaches have attracted various and significant cases, which either evolved to other forms or they later declined. This paper recognizes these different smart city approaches and their evolution, and it seeks to answer the following questions: what different approaches to smart city exist or have existed? How have the smart cities evolved? Do particular evolution roadmaps exist for smart cities? In order to answer these questions, this paper...

The Internet has been experienced as the means for deliberation, for free social expression, for knowledge exchange, for enabling entrepreneurship. etc., while it has been capitalized by communities around the world for applications' development and for e-service deployment. In this paper Internet is considered as a supporting tool for communities' growth and wealth, and in this context the local history and experiences are viewed as the basis to focus on the future. Communities grow in organized spaces called cities. Cities did and do not emerge to the same levels, since geographic, financial, political and other variants influence this evolution. However, some cities show significant growth without meeting some of the abovementioned criteria, mainly due to the fact that some civilians present particular intelligence and enthusiasm. Various exemplars of isolated spaces were evolved due to the intelligence of some habitants, which were followed by their future generations. I...

Economic recession has expanded during the last five years from U.S.A. to Europe and sprawls at an international level. Governments try to redefine their strategies and policies in order to recognize and deal with this unexpected environment, while they prioritize alternative methods in order to return to growth and to control national and supranational economics. Some of these strategic changes emphasize on innovation and research as the means to overcome this recession. The aim of this paper is to question and illustrate the connection between innovation and fiscal growth and in this order to explore whether Governments can apitalize innovation against fiscal crisis. Emphasis will be given on Information Technology (IT) innovation initiatives that are being undertataken with these updated strategies. Literature findings depict such an interconnection, while findings from the latest European strategies are compared to data from other countries regarding innovation’s capitalization ...

ABSTRACT Building high performing, effective teams is a prerequisite for successful project completion. This need is more profound and pervasive today with the recent shift to empirical software engineering paradigm and the employment of agile project management. In this paper, we present ONSOCIAL system, a system that attempts to capitalize knowledge accumulated over social networks and to support the team selection process. For achieving this objective, ONSOCIAL system is using information stored in social network systems, analyses the stored profiles and offers recommendations for candidate team members.

Smart City is an emerging and multidisciplinary domain. It has been recently defined as innovation, not necessarily but mainly through information and communications technologies (ICT), which enhance urban life in terms of people, living, economy, mobility and governance. Smart government is also an emerging topic, which attracts increasing attention from scholars who work in public administration, political and information sciences. There is no widely accepted definition for smart government, but it appears to be the next step of e-government with the use of technology and innovation by governments for better performance. However, it is not clear whether these two terms co-exist or concern different domains. The aim of this paper is to investigate the term smart government and to clarify its meaning in relationship to the smart city. In this respect this paper performed a comprehensive literature review analysis and concluded that smart government is shown not to be synonymous with smart city. Our findings show that smart city has a dimension of smart government, and smart government uses smart city as an area of practice. The authors conclude that smart city is complimentary, part of larger smart government movement.

Smart services concern the core element of a smart city, since they support the realization of urban “intelligence” in terms of people, economy, governance, environment, mobility and leaving. Smart services aim to enhance quality of life within a city and in this respect to improve “livability”. The types and purposes of smart services cannot be easily pre-defined, since they are the outcome of innovation, which cannot be pre-defined either, but instead it is the product of citizens’ and businesses’ creativity. However, standard bodies that work on smart city definition have described smart city portfolios, which are suggested to city policy makers and potential entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to validate whether standardized smart service portfolios are being followed by smart cities in practice. In this regard, a set of more than 70 smart cities are examined and their smart services are matched to these portfolios. The outcomes are extremely important and leave space for future research in this regard.

It's been more than a decade since the conception of the major e-Strategies, and significant outcomes have been delivered so far all over the world concerning infrastructure and e-service deployment. Already, most major e-Strategies have been reviewed and they are under update. British " t-Government " strategic plan and Obama's " Open Government Initiative " are only some of the transformation's results, where citizens are put in the center of strategic planning and some of the primary e-Government principles have been modified. In this paper we will explore how the most significant e-Strategies have been evolved, in which directions they are being transformed and why they have followed these directions. A systematic analysis on e-strategic planning is performed in order to structure an evolution e-strategic roadmap, which presents how e-strategic evolution is performed and how it is related with its past and with its future.

Smart cities suggest a domain that attracts an increasing scientific, political and economic attention. However, this domain is still confusing, since various parties define or apply alternative perspectives. Scientists document a technological smart city evolution from a website form to modern ubiquitous and eco-friendly ones; city networks describe this phenomenon more likely as a measurement system for intelligence in urban areas; business sector recognizes smart cities as " application boxes " for information technologies etc. This paper focuses on the abovementioned technological approaches to smart city and realizes that each approach attracted various cases, which later evolved to other forms or declined. To this end, it seeks to answer the following questions: what different technological approaches to smart city exist or have existed and how can they " fit " to market-driven defined approaches? How have the smart cities evolved? Do particular technology evolution roadmaps exist for smart cities? In order to answer these questions, this paper performs smart city classification, according to the alternative technological approaches that appear in literature and determines representative city cases together with similarities and differences among these approaches. Literature review is combined with data from the official websites of the representative cases, which returns groups of e-services that are being offered by different smart city approaches. These e-service groups are used to identify evolution roadmaps for smart city that can show how smart cities have emerged and to which particular directions are being evolved. The evolution roadmaps are depicted via the technology roadmapping tool. These roadmaps can become a useful tool for decision makers, who have to choose between alternative evolution forms and projects that secure smart city's viability. Viability is a crucial parameter for every project, especially due to recent financial recession, since smart cities demand extensive funding, which significantly affects large communities and local life.

Traditional competition between cities appears to transit to a “smart” competition and to this end smart city ownership, organization and evolution are questioned. In this paper, a worldwide smart city classification is performed in order to address the preferred organization and the technological evolution of smart city. This classification’s findings illustrate that State-Owned-Enterprise appears to be the preferred organization in most of the examined cases, while smart cities struggle in a niche international market arena.

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the factors that can predict citizen-initiated contact with
e-government as an attempt to identify important differences between service channel selections.
Although more than two decades have passed since the initiation of e-government, digital channel
choice is still being questioned, compared to traditional channels, and the level of selection with
channels is being investigated.
Design/methodology/approach – This study states three research questions that are answered
through a literature review and statistical analysis of a survey in a developed country. More specifically,
it identifies the factors that impact channel choice and validates them with survey results. To this end,
this paper utilizes data from a national Canadian survey, where citizens empirically evaluated their
channel choice – e-government, new digital media and traditional service channels – for government
contacts.
Findings – Statistical analysis over this data return valuable findings such as that the e-government
channel is more appropriate for information collection, whereas traditional service channels are more
likely to establish individual problem solving. Moreover, the digital divide appears to have an impact on
citizen channel choice. Furthermore, digitally literate citizens who are aware of privacy issues are more
likely to use new digital media. Finally, citizens are quite satisfied from their new digital media
experience, but are not as satisfied with their traditional contact experience.
Originality/value – These outcomes show that e-government obstacles regarding digital divide,
trust and efficiency remain active and have to be addressed more carefully by governments. This study
shows that e-government and new digital media are not simple channel choices, but are complex in
public service delivery. These outcomes confirm the significance of channel choice for transforming
government, as e-government appears to be a part of a broader channel choice agenda.

Netherlands), while in USA are being utilized several components and sub-modules of the system from the early 30s. The European Commission defined the electronic application for Building Permission as one of the 20 primary e-Government services, which each European Member State was obliged to deliver online by 2005, according to the e-Europe strategies (e- Europe2003). However, Greece, as well as several other European countries failed to address this challenge and the goal of an electronic building permission system across Europe was extended, initially until 2010 (i2010 strategy) and eventually until 2020 (Horizon 2020 strategy).
The current study initially defines the primary and secondary functionalities that such a system should have. Furthermore, the study examines the factors that influence the success or failure of such a project and proceed to a case study investigation in Greece by examining the current situation and the level of absorption of the European i2010 strategy regarding the electronic building permission.
The research framework encompasses a literature survey of publications and official reports in order to shape a “clear picture” regarding the different approach of e-service delivery. In addition, in this paper are analyzed the results of structured
questionnaires that have been sent and of interviews that have been conducted with public organizations in Greece that are
responsible for the implementation, installation and utilization of such a system (i.e. Information Society in Greece, Municipalities). In conclusion, this research investigates the framework of the building permission e-services and its current situation in Greece that leads to: (a) an effective public management administration by simplification of licensing procedures, (b) a reduction of depraved behavior and (c) environmental benefits by reducing bureaucracy.

Economic recession has expanded during the last five years from U.S.A. to Europe and spreads at an international level. Governments try to redefine their strategies and policies
in order to recognize and deal with this unexpected environment, while they prioritize alternative methods in order to return to growth and to control national and supranational
economics. Some of these strategic changes emphasize on innovation and research as the means to overcome this recession. The aim of this paper is to question and illustrate the
connection between innovation and fiscal growth and in this order to explore whether Governments can capitalize innovation against fiscal crisis. Emphasis will be given on
Information Technology (IT) innovation initiatives that are being undertataken with these updated strategies. Literature findings depict such an interconnection, while findings from the latest European strategies are compared to data from other countries regarding innovation’s capitalization against fiscal recession and national downturn.

More than a decade has passed since the launch of the first e-Government one-stop web portals, which concern
central points for digital access by citizens, enterprises and government. Due to the broad audience that these
portals serve, various analyses have been performed concerning their effectiveness with regard to service
delivery; trustworthiness with regard to service availability; usability; accessibility; and user satisfaction
etc. The results from these analyses have extreme interest for governments, since they reflect government
strategic planning, internal efficiency and effectiveness, while they have been utilized for their upgrades.
E-Government portal upgrade appears to be something usual and various updates have been observed in most
portals during this timeframe. This paper addresses and important issue: “do e-Government portal updates
enhance user satisfaction?” To this end, a comparative qualitative evaluation of some major e-Government
portals is performed, with the use of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) during 2009 and 2012.

Flood waves concern known risks for dam projects, which all engineering and designer teams address for the post-completion project period. To this end, dams are designed strong enough to sustain from such a disaster. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether a flood wave danger exists during the construction process of a dam and how a project manager can respond to the occurrence of such a crisis. In order to answer these questions, a panel of Greek experts justify this risk and validate a disaster-recovery model. This model was extracted from literature findings and aligns to international project management standards.

Urbanism is an emerging phenomenon and international predictions demonstrate that more than half ofthe increasing world population will live in cities by 2050. Interdisciplinary studies try to develop smartand eco-friendly solutions in order to enhance urban living. This paper validates that the eco-city urbanmodeling emerges radically and concerns an ideal paradigm for sustainable urban development. Aftercomparing alternative methods for eco-city modeling, this paper attempts to assess the sustainability ofthe eco-city with the System Dynamics (SD) simulation-based technique. A holistic SD methodologicalframework is proposed, as a means to assist decision-makers, local governments and managers designingand adopting effective policies for monitoring and assessing the sustainable performance of eco-cities.This framework is formed and tested with two case studies respectively and useful findings about theefficiency of the eco-city modeling are generated.

Smart cities have been evolving since their early appearance in late 1990s from metropolitan-wide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based solutions to today’s innovations –not necessarily based on ICT- that utilize city resources and improve local everyday life. This paper attempts to answer two research questions: (a) Does e-government research provide the appropriate theoretical capacity consisting of terms and frameworks that define smart city?  and (b) Is e-government research evolution able to provide the appropriate theoretical capacity to deal with smart city challenges? To answer these two research questions this paper follows a multi-methods approach comprising of (a) retrospective literature review (27 interdisciplinary journals, from 1997-2015 that publish smart city works are examined with regard to e-government and smart city) and define the key-areas of study (i.e., e-government in smart city etc.); and (b) prospective Delphi study (involving 16 experts in both e-government and smart city domains from prestigious universities, organizations, and cities across the globe), which identify action areas (i.e., livability and co-design) and measures for future e-government research contribution to the smart city. The results of this study shed light on existing gaps, interrelations, and reciprocities between e-government research and smart city and define an agenda for future research.

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.

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. After reading this book, the reader will succeed in gaining answers for the following questions: 1. What is a smart city? Does it concern urban innovation or something more complicated? 2. 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? 3. How is the smart city market structured and does it concern an industrial trick that leads government towards its development? 4. How the smart city -and its development- are governed and what is the role of government in a smart city? 5. What is the smart government and how is it related with the smart city? 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. This book contains five (5) more chapters. The following 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.