2. Smart Cities Atlas

New and fascinating examples about innovation in cities come from the real world. Every part of the industrialized world has indeed at least one case to show. But it is not just a matter of appearance, emerging economies may take the lead in the global economy growth forecast, but many studies show that the established top cities will continue to draw the wealthy for some years to come. Cities and network of cities will be the crossing point of the most important economic and financial initiatives. The catalogue of cities analysed in this section gives a synthetic representation of the measures carried out by some benchmark cities in the last ten years all over the world. Being a smart city is quite a complex goal to reach, both for cities to be designed ex novo (such as Masdar in the Arab Emirates or Caofeidian in Asia) as we will see at the end of the chapter, and for cities which have a long history behind them. Ex novo cities are also called top-down smart cities, while most of the examples reported next are bottom-up smart cities, that is, they start from existing settlements with different preconditions.