Understanding Smart Cities: A Tool for Smart Government or an Industrial Trick?

This book investigates the evolving role of smart cities in the broader context of urban innovation and digital government, identifies what a smart city is in practice and highlights its importance to the welfare of society. The book offers specific, measurable, and action-oriented public sector planning and management principles, technological artifacts, guides and ideas for smart governance in the era of global urbanization and innovation to help with the challenges in maintaining the democratic system of checks and balances as well as the division of powers in a highly interconnected world. Revised for the second edition, this volume includes up-to-date information about smart city progress, as well as new terminology, standards, technologies, and practices. The book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work within smart cities, innovation management, public administration, urban technologies and urban innovation, and public local administration studies.