Smart City Concept: A Case Study

Introduction

The introduction chapter is meant to explain the main forces that are driving researchers, governments and businesses to introduce the smart city concept.

Kanter and Litow (2009) said that cities are increasingly characterized by “mega-trends”, which are going to put them out of balance. The three main currents that are pushing cities towards ‘smarter’ approaches are demographic change, urbanization and their carbon footprint. In the 18th century, less than 5% of the global population lived in cities. Back then, the majority of people were engaged in sustainable food growth; they generated enough to survive. Currently, more than half of the world’s population is living in cities and the urbanization process is continuous in all countries. It is estimated that by the year 2050 66% of the world’s population will be residing in urban cities. In the 1950’s 30% were living in cities but that number increased to 54% in 2014 (United Nations, 2014).

Before the beginning of the twenty first century, it was suggested

This drove me to ask myself; what is a smart city? In order to answer this question, I researched the topic further to provide a historical outlook at how the term came to life. Therefore, in the next section, the literature review, you will read about the historical context that the smart city vision emerged from, moreover, you will read about other city visions that have been studied in the literature, each standing by itself would constitute parts of the smart city visions. Moreover, I have introduced the most cited frameworks that describe the dimensions and domains of a smart