Defining Smart Cities: a Relative and Dynamic Approach

Although the level of interest in smart cities is growing, the main issue – the smart city concept – is still open. The definition of smart city is not shared as well as the way to measure city’s smartness. The main approach has developed the concept of an “ideal” city which every city should tend because it represents the optimal standard. In this context, the aim of our paper is to break with the traditional point of view in favour of a new concept of smartness which identifies a city specific value of smartness, based on the efficient use of its own resources and related to the different context in which a city is situated. Thus, in this way, the concept of smartness becomes relative. Moreover when a city is very close to optimal value (i.e. maximum efficient frontier) then the frontier will shift upward because of the more attractiveness of the city but after a while the performance of the city goes down and a new adjustment mechanism should be followed to become efficient again (virtuous cycle). The needed time to be close again to the frontier will be correlated to the degree of inertia (reaction time) of urban government. So the smartness concept becomes dynamic as well as relative because it depends on how long the city takes to react and change the direction of its own performance to become smart again.