Smart Cities

Background
1.1 Aim of the project
Globalization, with trade liberalization measures and fast technological changes
altering the relations of production, distribution and consumption, has verysubstantial effects on city development. As one important consequence, (network-)
economies evolved ”[…] with easier physical movement, globalized players making
decisions with no regard to nationalboundaries”(Thornley, 2000). Along with this
progress private firms of the service sector but even of the production sector are
increasingly footless and flexible in their location behaviour. Besidesthe
technological changes it is the European integration process, which reduces the
differences in economic, social and environmental standards and norms and, thus,
provides a common market. Theongoing reduction of differences and barriers
between nations also makes cities more similar in their preconditions. Thus, only a
few out of many location-based characteristics gain importance forglobal actors
(Begg, 1999; Parkinson et al., 2003) enforcing competition across cites by altering
each city as potential competitor to improve its location profile. Cities in Europe
face the challengeof combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development
simultaneously. This challenge is likely to have an impact on issues of Urban Quality
such as housing, economy, culture, social andenvironmental conditions changing a
city's profile and urban quality in its composition of factors and characteristics.
This project deals with medium-sized cities and their perspectives fordevelopment.
Even though the vast majority of the urban population lives in such cities, the main
focus of urban research tends to be on the ‘global’ metropolises. As a result, the
challenges ofmedium-sized cities, which can be rather different, remain unexplored
to a certain degree. Medium-sized cities, which have to cope with competition of the
larger metropolises on corresponding issues, appear...