smart city and digital

The concept of Smart City embraces several definitions depending on the meanings of the word smart : intelligent city, knowledge city, ubiquitous city, sustainable city, digital city, etc. From literature analysis it emerges that Smart City and Digital City are the most used terminologies in literature to indicate the smartness of a city. This paper tries to investigate how these two concepts were born, how they have developed, which are the shared features and differences between them. To accomplish these goals, three steps were followed: (1) to set up a search strategy to collect papers about Smart City and Digital City using Google Scholar; (2) to store the selected subset in an ad-doc database to synthesize the literature review; (3) to organize the literature review subset to extract quantitative and qualitative data and information about Smart City and Digital City evolution. We propose literature review taxonomy through five specific analyses: (1) time analysis; (2) terminology analysis; (3) definitions analysis; (4) typology analysis; (5) geographic analysis. Regarding the definition of both Smart City and Digital City, we can observe that a shared and acknowledged definition of both Smart City and Digital City still lacks. Smart City definitions are more different, mainly because the purpose of a Smart City is often too large, that is, to improve the quality of urban life; depending on this goal, everything could be considered smart.