Smart Cities and the Future Internet: Innovation ecosystems of embedded spatial intelligence

Intelligent or smart cities rely on collaboration networks among human communities, innovation ecosystems, and digital infrastructure, applications and e-services, which enable the urban challenges of competitiveness, sustainability and inclusion to be addressed more efficiently. This urban paradigm is characterized by continuous transformation, fuelled by evolutions in innovation ecosystems, broadband networks and web technologies. This paper explores changes which are currently being introduced by future Internet research and outlines how cities and regions are affected by emerging Internet technologies, smart environments, and the resulting changes to innovation ecosystems. The paper is based on a corpus of foresight exercises, roadmaps to future Internet technologies and FIRE experimental facilities, OECD and governmental reports on the future of the Internet economy and surveys on hype cycles for smart city technologies. The first section is a short introduction to intelligent city concepts and looks at the turn towards future Internet technologies. Sections two and three are about the drivers of embedded spatial intelligence of cities guided by the rise of sensor networks and solutions embedded into the physical space of cities. The next four sections discuss the technological context of the future Internet and the expected impact of the Internet-of-Things, sensors, tags and RFID, semantic web, and cloud computing on smart cities. The final section is concerned with the new innovation ecosystems emerging from embedded spatial intelligence where citizen empowerment meets with smart environments.