Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Smart Cities Atlas
Raffaella Riva Sanseverino
Abstract
New and fascinating examples about innovation in cities come from the real
world. Every part of the industrialized world has indeed at least one case to
show. But it is not just a matter of appearance, emerging economies may take
the lead in the global economy growth forecast, but many studies show that the
established top cities will continue to draw the wealthy for some years to come.
Cities and network of cities will be the crossing point of the most important
economic and financial initiatives. The catalogue of cities analysed in this
section gives a synthetic representation of the measures carried out by some
benchmark cities in the last ten years all over the world. Being a smart city is
quite a complex goal to reach, both for cities to be designed ex novo (such as
Masdar in the Arab Emirates or Caofeidian in Asia) as we will see at the end of
the chapter, and for cities which have a long history behind them. Ex novo cities
are also called top-down smart cities, while most of the examples reported next
are bottom-up smart cities, that is, they start from existing settlements with
different preconditions.
