Smart City and Digital City: Twenty Years of Terminology Evolution

During the latest years, Smart city and Digital city have been recurring topics, especially after 2010. Smart and digital urban development is used like strategy to improve the quality of life in the cities. However, smart city and digital city are not well defined nor their boundaries are clearly identified. Smart and digital, referred to cities, are indifferently used, even if they have different meanings. The lack of a clear definition of smart city and digital city impacts on the difficult to sustain a strategy definition for urban development and to measure performance and reached results. It prevents local and central governments and companies to define a development path to implement smart and digital urban projects. This paper aims to investigate about the evolution of smart city and digital city concepts during the latest twenty years. A deep literature survey permits to compare each other several smart city and digital city definitions and finally to design the contents and the boundaries of each of these urban development paths, to better support urban strategies design and city performance evaluation.