Smart city in Europe: comparative analysis between Italy and Germany development

Abstract

The upward trend of urbanisation characterised by a rapidly growing number of city dwellers and an increasing population density is exacerbating sustainability issues such as air and water pollution, insufficient public waste management and relying on non-renewable energies, but also issues affecting the quality of citizens' life such as congestion, inadequate development of public transport systems and the lack of digitalisation of public services. The state-of-art of the smart city understanding and term definition stated by authors at different development stages of the smart city paradigm as well as a critical reflection of the approach of the smart city idea as an urban growth model is presented. A smart city multi-dimensional framework based on an input-process-output-impact model was chosen as a methodological approach to analyse the smart city best practices of Italian and German pioneering cities in the core dimensions of technology, community and policy.