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Digital City, Smart City and Beyond
Toru Ishida
Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University
ishida@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
ABSTRACT
This article revisited past digital cities, and discussed smart cities
and the future. If we understand digital cities as exploration of cyber
space and smart cities as exploitation of physical space, the next
stage is to evolve networked society based on cyber physical
systems. The current movements suggest two different directions,
socialization of commerce and commercialization of society. We
can predict the convergence of the two directions in the future.
CCS Concepts
Human-centered computing ➝ Collaborative and social
computing ➝ Collaborative and social computing theory,
concepts and paradigms.
Keywords
Digital city; smart city; cyber-physical system.
1. UNDERSTANDING TRENDS
From the 1990’s to the 2000’s, digital cities have been developed
and become operational in Europe and Asia. At first glance, it
seems natural to regard today’s smart cities as the successor of
digital cities. It is also natural to think that their differences are due
to the technologies they use, i.e., digital cities are characterized by
activities based on web services, while smart cities demonstrate
sensory services. This interpretation is not wrong but not so
persuasive, because some of digital cities have been developed to
connect virtual and real cities.
Let us submit two keywords “digital city” and “smart city” to
Google Trends on trial. We learn that smart cities evolved ten years
after the termination of digital city activities. In the meantime,
global optimization of resource usage was attracting increasing
attention around the world. Though there certainly are technological
advances from digital to smart cities, it is more meaningful to see
the “digital city” as the exploration of cyber space, while the “smart
city” is the exploitation of physical space. This approach makes it
easier to discuss what lies beyond the digital and smart cities. In
future cities, cyber and physical spaces will be more tightly
connected and our attention will shift from exploration or
exploitation to the evolution of systems and architectures of society.
2. DIGITAL CITY
Various approaches have been used to develop digital cities in
Europe and Asia [1]. In the US, corresponding activities were called
community networks. Those activities were collected and published
in three books entitled “Digital Cities” in 2000, 2002 and 2003.
Below, we classify their activities into three categories, social
interaction, virtual space, and connecting virtual and real spaces,
and introduce typical examples.
2.1 Social Interaction
The European Digital Cities Conference has been held annually
from 1994. The topics include telematics applications and car-free
cities. A good example is Digital City Amsterdam [2]. This city was
built as a platform for various community networks and thus
focuses on social interaction among citizens.
Digital City Amsterdam was launched by a non-profit organization
called DDS (De Digitale Stad) for communication between the
municipal council and citizens. All communication was presented
via text. Terminals were placed at public spaces such as libraries.
The success of this experiment increased the interest of the citizens
in the Internet. In the first ten weeks, 10,000 people registered with
the digital city and 100,000 accesses were recorded. The system
continued to grow, and in 1998, 80,000 users were registered with
the digital city.
2.2 Virtual Space
Helsinki Arena 2000 Project started in 1996, under the initiative of
the Helsinki telephone company (now Elisa) [3]. The goal of the
project was building the next generation metropolitan network. This
network enabled citizens to communicate with each other using live
video in both directions: members of a classic car community can
cooperate on repairs by using live video transfer.
In parallel to the development of high speed networks, an entire 3D
city of Helsinki was built. As the 3D model became more accurate,
more computational power and communication bandwidth were
required to view the digital city at home. The virtual city was a face
of the project, and provided a human interface for new broadband
services. Though there was a big discussion on whether or not 3D
virtual reality was useful, the 3D Helsinki was accepted by the
Finnish people who always prefer new technologies.
2.3 Connecting Virtual and Real Spaces
Kyoto was the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, and
has been a cultural center of Japan for even longer. We started a
digital city project for Kyoto in 1998 [4] with two design policies.
The first was to make it real by establishing a strong connection to
the physical Kyoto: The digital city complemented the
corresponding physical city, and provided an information center for
everyday life for actual urban communities. We thought “digital”
and “physical” make things “real.” The second policy was to make
the digital city live by dynamically integrating web archives and
real-time sensory information created in the city.
We proposed the three layer model as a system architecture suitable
for digital cities. The first layer, called the information layer,
integrates web archives and realtime sensory data and reorganizes
them using the city metaphor. The second layer, called the interface
layer, uses 2D maps and 3D virtual spaces to provide an intuitive
view of digital cities. We developed FreeWalk and the scenario
description language Q for 3D virtual spaces with social agents [5].
The animation of moving objects such as avatars, cars, busses, and
trains demonstrated some of the dynamic activities in the cities. The
© 2017 International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2),
published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.
WWW 2017 Companion, April 3-7, 2017, Perth, Australia.
ACM 978-1-4503-4914-7/17/04.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3054710
third layer was called the interaction layer where residents and
tourists interact with each other. If an animation reflected a real
activity, the moving object became a tool for social interaction:
users could click the object to communicate with it.
In the Kyoto railway station, we installed a disaster evacuation
system that tracks passengers to help them navigate [6]. As the
sensors, we placed twenty eight cameras in Kyoto station, and
captured the movements of passengers in real time. A 3D virtual
city system was used to reproduce the passengers' behavior. A
bird’s-eye view of the real space was reproduced on the screen of
the control center so that evacuation leaders in the center could
easily monitor the station. The leader can point at particular
passengers on the screen, and talk to them through their mobile
phones. We also implemented a large-scale outdoor evacuation
system. A simulation with three thousand agents controlled by
evacuation scenarios was performed in parallel with an experiment
in the real space. The leader could issue high level instructions to
the evacuees, and precise navigation instructions were automatically
generated by the agent for each evacuee.
3. SMART CITY AND BEYOND
3.1 Smart City
A large amount of literature has been published on smart cities. The
definitions of smart cities and comparison to related concepts are
found in [7, 8]. Though the conceptual relatives of the smart city
include digital city, intelligent city, virtual city, ubiquitous city and
information city, since the substantial volume of activities were
under the name of digital city, we focus on comparing the concepts
of digital city and smart city in this article. According to [8], digital
cities provide innovative services based on broadband
communication and service-oriented computing, while smart cities
apply technologies of self-monitoring and self-response systems to
complex social problems including scarcity of resource, inadequate
and poor infrastructure, energy shortages and price instability,
global environment, and human health.
The above definitions include two separate aspects. One is the
technological aspect, which highlights the difference between
digital cities with the rise of the Internet, and smart cities being
challenged in the era of IoT. The other is the social aspect, which
distinguishes roles in human society: digital cities explore cyber
space while smart cities exploit physical space. Both digital and
smart cities represent paradigms, which are the general approaches
adopted by a community for carrying out research and development.
If we take the former technological aspect, it will become difficult
to discuss the next stage of smart cities, but the latter social aspect
can trigger the broad discussion of future cities. The rest of the
article outlines recent and future evolution in human societies.
3.2 Socialization of Commerce
One evolution is to network for-profit activities. A typical example
is Industrie 4.0 in Germany. The initiative aims at networking a
large number of manufacturing companies to create a nation-wide
supply chain. Large scale factories in developing countries for mass
production are no longer necessary. Instead, a network of many
companies for mass customization will appear regionally.
There are several related activities. Michael Porter proposed the
concept of CSV (creating shared value) which could reshape
capitalism and its relationship to society. A for-profit sector Y
Combinator will conduct a trial in support of universal basic income
in Silicon Valley. The design firm IDEO now has both for-profit
(.com) and non-profit (.org) organizations and employees move
from one to the other flexibly. In France, it is now illegal to waste
food. Supermarkets must sign contracts with non-profit
organizations to collect and distribute the food. Unfortunately, since
the efficiency of for-profit and non-profit organizations are far
different, the connection is not seamless at this moment. However,
we can discover potential problems from their courageous
challenge.
3.3 Commercialization of Society
Another evolution is the commercialization of citizens’ ordinary
life. Networking of unused resources in society can reveal profitable
resources. A typical example is called the sharing economy such as
Uber and Airbnb. Most cars in large cities are idled in parking lots.
It is reasonable to share them to reduce environmental burden.
Related non-profit activities called sharing cities have been
launched in Seoul, Amsterdam, and so on. Although most of their
activities are non-profit, sharing cities are creating substantial values
by recycling resources. Similarly, newly created social innovation
companies are viewing their market as a long tail investment.
We can expect the convergence of the two evolutions in the future,
i.e., for-profit and non-profit activities will be connected seamlessly
to sustain our society [9].
4. REFERENCES
[1] Toru Ishida. Understanding Digital Cities. Digital Cities:
Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives, Springer-
Verlag, pp.7-17, 2000.
[2] Peter Van den Besselaar and Dennis Beckers. The life and
death of the great Amsterdam Digital City. Digital Cities III.
Information Technologies for Social Capital: Cross-cultural
Perspectives. Springer-Verlag, pp. 66-96, 2003.
[3] Risto Linturi, Marja-Riitta Koivunen and Jari Sulkanen.
Helsinki Arena 2000 - Augmenting a real city to a virtual one.
Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future
Perspectives, Springer-Verlag, pp. 83-96, 2000.
[4] Toru Ishida. Digital City Kyoto: Social Information
Infrastructure for Everyday Life. Communications of the ACM
(CACM), Vol. 45, No. 7, pp. 76-81. 2002.
[5] Toru Ishida. Q: A Scenario Description Language for
Interactive Agents. IEEE Computer, Vol.35, No.10, pp.54-59,
2002.
[6] Toru Ishida, Yuu Nakajima, Yohei Murakami and Hideyuki
Nakanishi. Augmented Experiment: Participatory Design with
Multiagent Simulation. International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07), pp. 1341-1346, 2007.
[7] Leonidas Anthopoulos and Panos Fitsilis. From Digital to
Ubiquitous Cities: Defining a Common Architecture for Urban
Development. International Conference on Intelligent
Environments, pp. 301-306, 2010.
[8] Taewoo Nam and Theresa A. Pardo. Conceptualizing Smart
City with Dimensions of Technology, People, and Institutions.
Annual international digital government research conference,
pp. 282-291 2011.
[9] Jeremy Rifkin. The zero marginal cost society: The internet of
things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of
capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
