The Advancement of World Digital Cities

Since the early 1990s, and particularly with the popularization of the Internet and the World Wide Web, a wave of experiments and initiatives has emerged, aiming at facilitating city functions such as community activities, local economies and municipal services. This chapter reviews advancements of worldwide activities focused on the creation of regional information spaces. In the US and Canada, a large number of community networks using the city metaphor appeared in the early 1990s. In Europe, more than one hundred similar initiatives have been tried out, often supported by large governmental project funds. Asian countries are rapidly adopting the latest information and communication technologies for actively interacting real-time city information and creating civic communication channels. All of the above cases are loosely related but independent activities, and thus their goals, services, and organization bodies differ. Wide varieties of names and buzzwords have been employed for labeling localized information and communication networks, depending on the fashion of the moment and their characteristics. ‘Cybercities’, ‘virtual cities’, ‘community networks’ and ‘civic networks’ are examples of names that have been attached to all sorts of projects. These definitions are very vague and therefore disputed. In this chapter, we will follow the terminology developed in our research community during the past decade and refer to such information spaces as ‘Digital Cities’.