The Smart City or Community Concept

By its basic definition, a community that has made a conscious effort to employ telecom and information technology to transform its essential modus operandi, would be considered a Smart Community. This transformation is deemed beneficial to the community at large, which attracts and engages participation and cooperation among the local community, education, government and commercial entities (or other interested community constituent clusters).

Smart Communities attempt to improve their citizen's lifestyles through increased interaction and collaboration by fully utilizing their telecom infrastructure; also, at the same time, they attempt to lessen the demand on their physical traditional transportation infrastructure (and thereby reduce environmental pollution).

Smart Communities are also striving to become economically competitive in the global networked economy, and attract their unfair share of commerce as a result of marketing an existing (and/or planned) community telecom infrastructure investment. Make no mistake in your interpretation of the intrinsic motivation here, this is a very assertive community positioning strategy (offensive and/or defensive, depending on your point of view).

A Smart City isn't necessarily the same as a Smart Community. A city is a legal entity, or a finite unit of local government. A community, in contrast, is considered a broader term that defines a superset of a city and encompasses the array of neighborhoods, organizations, groups and individuals that collectively constitute the community and give it a sense of place.

Again, the Smart Community doctrine implies transformation of a traditional community. Therefore, it's beyond mere incremental enhancement of a single community element, such as automation of a function of city government (i.e. issuing permits or licenses online, etc.), or providing public access to city information on an electronic bulletin board or kiosk. The mantra of the Smart Community evangelists tends to be more creative and comprehensive in its essence.