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Georges-Yves KERVERN <gyk@tactic.fr>
Sorbonne, Paris University
France
John M. EGER <jeger@mail.sdsu.edu>
World Foundation for Smart Communities
USA
I. DOUGLAS <i.douglas@man.ac.uk>
Manchester University
United Kingdom
Smart communities are defined as communities using information technology and especially intranet systems in territorial communities such as local areas, cities, districts, and regions. The paper will describe the state of the art for smart communities in North America by using the data bank of the World Foundation for Smart Communities (La Jolla, California) and in Europe by using the data banks of Telecities (Brussels), of TRN (TeleRegion Network; Brussels), and of AVN (French Digital Cities Association; Paris). Safe Communities is a program originated by the World Health Organization. Its global systemic/holistic approach of risk management in local areas will be described theoretically and technologically. Examples of decision support systems using the latest advances in cindynics (the science of danger) will be given. The Smart and Safe Communities Program supported by American and European universities will develop the methodologies and technologies allowing the use of intranet and geographical information systems in risk and crisis management by local, urban, and regional risk managers. Decision support systems combined with Internet/intranet technologies will be used to monitor these systems. Efficiency measurements of the systems are mainly probabilities and severities of catastrophes and accidents. Present statistics show a big gap between industrial plants on one side and urban environments on the other. Advanced risk management can remedy the underdevelopment of local-area risk management, and the Internet is the way to make it happen.
Cities and towns, by their very nature, represent the "chemistry" of all the social, economic, and cultural changes of the information society at the local democratic level. Since 1993, Telecities has been bringing together cities and towns sharing similar interests and goals for the development of telematics applications in an urban context.
This network of cooperation was launched by a small group of members of Eurocities (the association of European metropolitan areas grouping over 80 cities of more than 250,000 inhabitants over 20 European countries). Today Telecities has its own elected steering committee and its own rules democratically defined by its members at the annual general meetings. The network has expanded its scope and now represents over 100 cities and towns (with populations ranging in size from tens of thousands of inhabitants to several million) from the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe as well as private observer members (including Philips, Telecom Italia, ICL, BULL, and SUN). As the democratic expression of user needs and demand for telematics applications in the urban context, Telecities has the essential role of maintaining a high profile and understanding of the implications, risks, and opportunities offered by the new information and communication technologies for local authorities/city governments. This level of political commitment from the most senior politicians representing local interests across Europe is what differentiates Telecities from other initiatives and networks, and is why Telecities stresses the importance of universal access to the information society and of support for cultural and linguistic diversity at all levels.
Telecities provides an open cooperation network for the development of European digital cities. This framework allows the cities and towns to reach a consensus on the demand for telematics services, applications, and infrastructures that support the regeneration of urban areas through socioeconomic development. Thus it enables cities to develop new strategies to fight unemployment and social exclusion and improve quality of life.
The following chart shows the main functions of cities and regions in telematics development:
Major roles of local authorities in the development of the information society
The application areas of telematics in urban are very numerous. Up to now these applications or services are contributing to three main policy objectives: i) economic development or regeneration; ii) social cohesion and quality of life; and iii) better management of the city administration and its infrastructures. Of course all these policy objectives are interlinked and a single application can contribute to more than one policy objective, but we tried to cluster the application areas around policy objectives for which the foreseen impact is the most important.
A variety of strategies are currently being implemented by cities acting either independently or jointly:
Here telematics technologies are used to improve the functioning and the management of various public services.
Up to now, the risk and crisis management functions have not been given the place and priority they deserve. This is the central diagnosis justifying the present paper and the program Smart and Safe.
If we now look specifically at the Telematics Applications Program, some 60 European cities and regions have already started up pilot projects following strategies that are either implicit (based on the opportunities that present themselves) or more explicit (defined according to priorities set by the municipal authority). These projects range from a "simple" web server on the analogue telephone network that enables PC owners to access services via an Internet provider to more complex solutions based on intranet technologies that integrate the whole chain of the production and provision of services.
However, these experiments are still restricted in a number of areas:
As described above, telematics can have positive effects on a wide range of public services (economic development, urban planning, reducing the need to travel, etc.). But the deployment of these applications is very complex because of the large number of players involved as well as the re-organization process required. More and more cities are introducing a telematics section in their overall city strategy.
The development of urban telematics policies in Europe, having roots in earlier information technology strategies, dates mainly from the early 1990s. It has been included in European agendas (e.g., the Bangemann Report) and in a number of strands of the EC Telematics Applications Program, above all the Telematics for Urban and Rural Areas (TURA) subprogram.
The key features identified among 10 cities surveyed in 1996 in the framework of the European Digital Cities project (Antwerp; Barcelona; Cologne; Den Haag; Lewisham/South East London; Marseille; Rome; Ronneby; Southampton/Hampshire; Vienna) include the following:
In fewer than five years, the great global network of computer networks called the Internet has blossomed from an arcane tool used primarily by academics and government researchers into a worldwide mass communications medium that is rapidly becoming a backbone of business-to-business communications and is poised to become a leading carrier of communications and financial transactions within all segments of society.
Where is this all leading? A great many capable writers -- ranging from industry leaders like Microsoft Corporation's Bill Gates and former Citibank Chairman Walter Wriston to serious academics like MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte and The Discovery Institute's George Gilder, to pop-scholars like John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame and The Whole Earth Catalogue founder Howard Rheingold -- have forecast in elaborate detail the ways in which the Internet will change our lives. With predictions ranging from electronic "virtual communities" in which people interact socially with like-minded Internet users around the globe, to fully networked homes in which electronic devices and other appliances whir to life on the homeowner's spoken command, these writers and many others paint a future that looks a lot like science fiction -- except that it's fast becoming reality.
What most of these analyses lack, however, is a sophisticated understanding of how the ongoing Internet explosion will affect our larger physical environment. It is one thing to forecast the development of an "intelligent home" that can monitor ambient temperature, warn against possible home-security violations, and make the morning coffee, all in the blink of a cursor. It is quite another to confidently speculate about what kinds of homes and neighborhoods this future will hold, or whether there will even be "homes" or "neighborhoods" in the sense we have come to know them.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to refer to the domain in which Internet-based communications occur as "cyberspace" -- an abstract "communications space" that exists both everywhere and nowhere. But until flesh-and-blood human beings can be digitized into electronic pulses in the same way in which computer scientists have transformed data and images, the denizens of cyberspace will have to live IRL ("in real life") in some sort of real, physical space -- a physical environment that will continue to dominate and constrain our future lives in the same way that our homes, neighborhoods, and communities do so today.
What will this future physical space look like, how will it be affected by the Internet explosion, and how will it change our lives? To answer these questions, we must begin to intelligently forecast our physical as well as our virtual futures, to extend our thinking beyond the everyday notions of "cyberspace" to the unfamiliar but equally necessary character of our physical environments as mediated by the Internet and the World Wide Web -- a very real, physical place called "cyberplace."
Already, communities and nations around the globe -- often without being consciously aware of it -- are starting to sketch out the first drafts of the "cyberplaces" of the 21st century. Singapore has launched its IT2000 initiative, also known as the Intelligent Island Plan. Japan is building an electronic future called Technopolis, or Teletopia.
So, in the United States, the Clinton Administration is pursuing a vigorous National Information Initiative, one of whose early goals is to link every school and every school child to the Internet by the year 2000.
Many communities in the United States have undertaken similar initiatives. Los Angeles, Seattle, and the Sacramento, California, region, for instance, have constructed large-scale public-access networks that residents can use to obtain information about government activities, community events, and critical social services such as disaster preparedness, child abuse prevention, and literacy education. The university town of Blacksburg, Virginia, has transformed itself into an electronic village, in which the majority of the town's businesses and residents are connected to the local data network. And cities such as San Diego, as part of its "City of the Future" project, are building even more sophisticated electronic infrastructures that, one day soon, will allow a wide variety of local government, business, and institutional transactions (particularly in business permitting, health care, and education) to take place online.
Recognizing that electronic networks like these will play an increasingly important role in a municipality's economic competitiveness, the state of California early last year launched a statewide Smart Communities program, which has been managed since its inception by the International Center for Communications at San Diego State University. The program defines a "smart community" as "a geographical area ranging in size from a neighborhood to a multicounty region whose residents, organizations, and governing institutions are using information technology to transform their region in significant, even fundamental, ways."
The operative term in this definition is "transformation," a term quite familiar to San Diego State's International Center for Communications. The Center was founded in 1990 to explore the transformative potential of information technology on people's lives, particularly as these changes were played out in the context of community. As the Center's understanding of the effects of electronic networks has grown over the intervening years, we have come to realize that the true promise of electronic information networks lies not just in helping communities and the institutions within them to carry out their historical tasks more efficiently, but in literally transforming the institutions and the tasks they undertake, for the benefit of all their people.
California's Smart Communities program was designed to catalog these effects by systematically surveying emerging smart communities around the United States and throughout the world, and to assist California's communities in applying the lessons learned in their own localities. Our fundamental premise as we began this project, subsequently borne out by our review of dozens of such communities, was that smart communities were not, at their core, exercises in the deployment and use of technology, but in the promotion of economic development, job growth, and an increased quality of life. In other words, technological propagation in smart communities wasn't an end in itself, but only a means to a larger end with clear and compelling community benefit.
As we examined the multitudes of smart communities, we came to three surprising and, frankly, disturbing conclusions. The first was that California -- the global leader in the development and application of information technology and computer software -- was far behind the rest of the country in the use of such technology for the betterment of its communities. Second, we discovered that the majority of smart community projects, in California and elsewhere, were focused much more heavily on the building of information technology infrastructures than on the development of high-value applications. And third, in part for this reason, we found that most smart community initiatives -- even those that had been around for many years -- simply were not very transformative.
As we probed more deeply, we learned that this lack of transformative power resulted primarily from the absence of clear and compelling models for re-engineering community-based institutions and processes in order to take full advantage of all that advanced information technologies had to offer. Local business Web pages, for example, were important steps forward, but as implemented in practice, they typically were little more than high-tech spins on the old concepts of commercial Yellow Pages and newspaper display ads. Online listings of community events were a useful resource, but they, too, were little more than an electronic version of similar print-based listings that appeared weekly in the local newspaper. And online government transactions, such as applying for welfare assistance and business permits, certainly increased the efficiency of government operations, but did little to transform the ways in which government related to its citizens, or to appreciably improve a community's economic competitiveness or quality of life.
These discoveries made it clear to us that if the smart community concept were to achieve its goals of promoting economic development, jobs, and an improved quality of life within a community, it would need as its foundation a more sophisticated understanding of the transformative potential of technology -- in particular, an understanding of the ways in which technology could remake local institutions and processes so as to profoundly benefit a local region. And that, in turn, required a fuller appreciation of the likely effects of technology on people, places, and the physical environment -- in other words, a delineation of the cultural geography not just of cyberspace, but of cyberplace.
These technological changes are taking place at the same time that the world's geopolitical landscape is being radically redefined. Because of previous advances in telecommunications and information technology, a fundamental realignment of political and economic power is well under way. Political and economic decision-making is increasingly taking place not in national capitals, but in states, cities, and other municipalities. This change has been driven in part by the prevailing bureaucratic inertia in many national capitals, but in a larger respect by the recent "informational empowerment" of local leaders.
Local leaders no longer depend on national governments for policy ideas and information, and are no longer content to be bound by the one-size-fits-all pronouncements of national legislators. They are taking social and economic matters into their own hands, pursuing policies that will promote job creation, economic growth, and an improved quality of life within their regions regardless of the policies enacted at the national level.
This "reverse flow of sovereignty," in which local governments are assuming more responsibility than ever before for their residents' well-being, has come about at a time when information and markets of all types are becoming increasingly globalized. News, currency, and economic and political intelligence, not to mention products and services, can no longer be contained within national borders. Instead, they flow, often instantaneously, to all corners of the globe, making it difficult or even impossible for national governments to influence political or economic conditions over which they held unquestioned control not long ago. The result is a geopolitical paradox in which the nation-state, too large and distant to solve the problems of localities, has become too small to solve the borderless problems of the world.
If nation-states are too small to master these global problems, then local units of government are even less well-suited to the task. Yet, the need for localities to exert control over the economic and political conditions that affect them is greater than ever before. The same telecommunications and information technologies that have globalized world markets have simultaneously ballooned the competitive sphere in which localities must operate. For instance, locally based companies that once competed with firms only in their own area code now must battle companies throughout the world for their customers' loyalty and dollars. Likewise, local governments that once had to compete for high-value residents against only nearby municipalities with the amenities their competitors could muster, now must struggle to attract such residents in a world where a growing number of people can live nearly anywhere they want and still have access to the same jobs, the same income, and the same products and services to which they have grown accustomed.
These circumstances have given rise to the widely quoted prescription for global business success: "Think locally, compete globally." However, the circumstances have led to something even more momentous. They have forced localities, increasingly unable to depend upon national governments to solve their problems, to fend for themselves in a global environment that is more competitive and more challenging than any in history. To meet these challenges, many farsighted localities have begun to transform themselves from fractured, often highly contentious regions in which a thousand interests compete for larger shares of shrinking budgets, into something more akin to the city-states of old than to the archetypal municipalities of modern-day political science texts.
While Singapore is the model city-state of the future, more modern-day regions such as Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and Joint-Venture Silicon Valley, California, are two of the world's leading examples of new city-states. Both possess a number of common features, including a focus on a broader, often transnational region that typically extends far beyond the principal city's boundaries. The new city-states' most important characteristic is one that has been rare amid the internecine political warfare that has defined most municipalities in the 20th century: collaboration. This collaboration crosses different functional sectors -- government, business, academia, nonprofit organizations, and others-- and different jurisdictions within a given geographical region. These "collaboratories" are quickly becoming the new model for successful urban organization in the global age, and they are the only local political arrangement likely to make it possible for besieged municipalities to survive and thrive given the increasingly intense global competition that lies ahead.
The question is, What purpose does collaboration serve? It is not enough to say that such collaborative arrangements must be designed to increase a region's ability to attract what the emerging information technologies have to offer. First, they must create the right collaborative structures, so that all key leaders in the community are involved, with the single purpose of transforming the community as rapidly as possible into a highly competitive, smart, and sustainable community. In the new collaborative framework, "buy in" from all affected parties is essential, but the need to achieve consensus should not be used as an excuse for bureaucratic foot-dragging, or as a means of extorting special privileges for certain groups or sectors.
The second requirement for creating this competitive local framework is that the new information network must be woven into community residents' lives as quickly, seamlessly, and completely as possible. As long as significant portions of a community's population are not served by or do not rely upon this network, the traditional ways of doing things -- along with their associated institutions and procedures -- will remain in place, making it impossible to truly transform a community in any significant way. Kiosks and community centers, the most common access points in today's smart community networks, are adequate if relatively inconvenient transitional solutions. However, using these new local information networks must become as easy and as undemanding as picking up a telephone or turning on the television set if they are to become a routine part of residents' everyday lives.
Third, in order to bring about this competitive framework, communities must develop a coherent and compelling vision that makes it clear how the new information networks are going to promote job growth, economic development, and improved quality of life within the community. This is the key element that is missing from so many smart community plans today, and yet it is the most essential: unless a community knows precisely where it is headed and how it hopes to get there, it is unlikely to reach its destination, to the detriment of all its residents.
If we look at statistics of injuries and fatalities in the day-to-day life of our territorial communities, we face the hard facts concerning the emergency of safety as a priority.
If smart communities were not to be safe, the word sustainability will be nonsense. This is an incentive to rethink and reengineer urbanism.
James Howard Kuntzler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, a comprehensive look at the crises of place in America's suburbs, blames our problems on the greed of developers, the short-sightedness of civic officials, and the auto and petroleum interests.
A new breed of architects, planners, and developers is beginning to pencil in that new vision of America in the Information Age. It is a bold vision that deals with the crises of growth and "the current development sprawl, while returning to a cherished American icon, that of a compact, close-knit community," according to Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. "The prospect of a new century," says Katz, "raises serious concerns about the quality of life that can be expected in a future era of diminished global resources."
According to Vice President Al Gore, we are on a "collision course between our worldwide civilization and the ecological system of the earth. The population explosion is now adding the equivalent of China's population every 10 years, or 10 billion people by 2005. If we continue to poison our water, deplete our ozone, clear-cut our forests, and perpetuate urban sprawl at the current rate, we will surely exhaust our remedies to survive as a species."
The urgency of our dilemma has reached an acute stage. Thus, as we examine our current policies of land development and urban planning, new nonlinear solutions are imperative. The thing that we must remember, urges Katz, is that "all of the strategies must be examined, tested and tested again in relation to prevailing developmental models. If a new urbanism can indeed be shown to deliver higher, more sustainable quality of life to a majority of this nation's citizens, the movement to the next paradigm could well be much more than the return to the close-knit community of small town America, with its village greens and mixed-use zoning. It could be a spiritual return to the kind of community enjoyed by the earliest Americans."
Until recently, advances in telecommunications and transportation have contributed to our disconnectedness, rather than cemented us as a people; atomized our sense of community rather than provided us with a sense of place. Yet without a cultural center, a shared history, or a commitment to neutral goals and visions, there is little to cement communities together. Some communities are showing the way. Portland, Oregon, with its urban growth boundary, and Seattle, Washington, with its lakes and trees and precious open spaces, are attracting the knowledge worker and some of the best high-tech, information-sensitive industries. Other communities, sensing the trend, are also positioning themselves to be both smart and sustainable. But the recognition that we can be both, or that the one is a natural extension of the other, is just beginning to enter the lexicon of the urban planner and the architect, as well as those involved in economic development.
Technology is already helping planners with a number of difficult tasks: comparing the value of tree covers used for storm-water containment; using desktop geographic information systems to allow community leaders to put the natural environment into their city planning; and using satellite data, aerial photography, and on-the-ground surveys to help define a city's ecostructures. Technology is also being used by citizens in one part of the world to link environmentally concerned citizens in another, providing an effective means of organizing how to plan and design the smart communities of tomorrow, protect the earth, and share ideas on how to build smart but sustainable communities.
But much more seems within our reach. Chief Sealth, who settled in Seattle, and for whom the town is named, explained:
This we do know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
For many years, the World Health Organization has developed two programs:
Simultaneously, risk managers in the industry have put together tools for risk prevention and crisis management. These tools show evident cross-sectorial commonalities. These commonalities are now conceptualized by a quickly emerging new science, the science of danger, cindynics (see Kervern 1994).
What has been recently discovered is a commonality between cindynogeneous mechanisms in both companies and families; systemic family therapy has entered the field of cindynics. The violence in society is very often preproduced in family crisis. This is a demonstration of the pertinence of the holistic approach of risk advocated by cindynics.
It is now possible to use risk management concepts and systemic approach in cities and territorial communities. This will be a breakthrough in local area risk management. The contribution of urban intranet to the monitoring of risk and emergency management is now feasible. The concept of intownet has been proposed by the mayor of Parthenay, France. Already, decision support systems have been designed for monitoring forest fires. The United Kingdom's ALARM (Association of Local Areas Risk Managers) is in contact with the Smart and Safe team.
The Smart and Safe Program organizes the systemic combination of intranet monitoring capabilities and the efficiency of cindynic systems for risk and crisis management.
The Karolinska Institutet (http://www.ki.se/phs/wcc-csp) has taken leadership in promoting European collaboration in European Safe Community Network/ESCON. ESCON has started its "on the road." A network meeting was organized 1997 by Karolinska Institutet and the Falköping Municipality in Sweden to promote the establishment of ESCON. National and local representatives of 21 countries have accepted the working documents of the network and elected a steering committee and a secretariat (katharina.purtscher@kfunig raz.ac.at and robert.ekman@phs.ki.se).
In May 1998 two business meetings were held in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. During those meetings the idea behind ESCON was presented and further interdisciplinary and internationally contacts were established. ESCON's main objectives are to:
ESCON is an inclusive organization. Its basic aims are coalition-building and cooperation with all possible individuals, communities, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Europe that share our vision of injury prevention and safety. It is not the framework of the organization but the action itself that counts. The Network wishes to achieve its aims by the following strategies: 1) strengthening the organization by building alliances with all organizations interested; 2) promoting injury prevention on the agenda of other groups and networks; 3) enhancing the contacts of Network participants by organizing meetings, conferences, exchange programs, site visits, and seminars on injury prevention; 4) developing the electronic links via Internet to facilitate the transfer and dissemination of the information; and 5) developing resources such as guidelines and documents to disseminate the results of existing and future Centres of Excellence.
In conclusion, we consider that safety will become one of the main strategic priorities and justification of the money committed to Internet developments in local areas and cities. This is a new and major crossroad between the Internet and sustainability.
Aurigi, Alessandro (1997): Entering the Digital City: Surveying City-Related Web Sites in Europe, paper presented in the 3rd European Digital Cities Conference; Berlin, December 1997.
Castells, Manuel (1997): The Network Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford: Blackwell.
Centre d'étude sur les réseaux, les transports, l'urbanisme et les constructions publics -CERTU- (1998): Collectivités locales et télécommunications
Cornford, James, and Robert Naylor, CURDS (1998): Good practice case studies in European Digital Cities
Graham, Stephen, and Alessandro Aurigi (1997), 'Virtual Cities, Social Polarization, and the Crisis in Urban Public Space', in Journal of Urban Technology, vol. 4, Nr. 1, April 1997, pp. 19-52.
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin (1996), Telecommunications and the City - Electronic spaces, urban places, Routledge, London/New York.
Kervern, Georges-Yves (1994), Latest Advances in Cyndinics. Economica Paris.
Kluzer, Stefano, and Marco Farinelli (1997): A Survey of European Cities' Presence on the Internet, Working paper No 31, Databank Consulting: ACTS; FAIR: Milan.
League of California Cities (1998): League of California Cities Telecommunications Policy of Universal Access. Abstracted from the League's World Wide Web site.
Nunn, Samuel and B. Hoseph Rubleske (1997): Webbed Cities and Development of the National Information Highway: The Creation of World Wide Web Sites by U.S. City Governments, Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 4, No 1, April, pp: 53 - 80.
Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. (1994): Cities and the New Global Economy, Conference Proceedings (Vol.3) Melbourne, Australia.
Rete Urbana delle Rappresentanze (RUR): Le città digitali in Italia, 1998
On safe communities:
Telecities is an open network for concerted urban development through Telematics.
It was initiated by the Eurocities Technological Cooperation Committee in 1993 as a working group of cities wishing to cooperate in developing the potential of telematic applications in order to support the economic regeneration and social and cultural development of cities throughout Europe. Finally, in April 1994 at the first annual general meeting where a steering committee was elected, Telecities was launched as a democratic network of cooperation.
One reason for the success of the Telecities cooperation network is the opportunity offered to local and regional decision-makers to meet, to exchange experiences and to articulate the urban demand with regard to common issues concerning the deployment of the Information Society.
With 103 members, including 93 from 13 member states of the European Union, Telecities brings together a rich diversity of skills, expertise, and experience and represents the whole spectrum of the European urban telematics demand. It aims to build a consensus on the development of a harmonized information infrastructure including the widest possible range of practical applications and services.
The objective is to provide an open cooperation network for European digital cities, through which they will achieve a common definition regarding the urban demand for telematics services, applications, and infrastructures that support the regeneration of urban areas through:
In identifying appropriate telematics services and applications responding to user needs and clearly defined by the cities themselves, Telecities also promotes the development of technological solutions lending themselves to interoperability and interconnectivity and moving toward standardization. For these reasons, together with the willingness to develop innovative public-private partnerships, the network is not only open to cities, towns, and regional institutions, but also to technology and service providers who can participate as observer members.
The Telecities priorities are to:
President: Den Haag, Vice President: Antwerpen.
Other steering committee members: Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, London-Lewisham, Manchester, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, Nice (observer).
Other members from the European Union: Aalborg, Amaroussion, Aarhus, Amsterdam, Bari, Belfast, Besançon, Bilbao, Birmingham, Bonn, Bradford, Brighton & Hove, Bristol, Cardiff, Charleroi, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Eindhoven, Espoo, Frankfurt, Gent, Göteborg, Grenoble, Groningen, Hamburg, Hammersmith & Fulham, Helsinki, Heraklion, Hull, Islington, Kirklees, Knowsley (Liverpool borough), Köln, Las Palmas, Leeds, Leeuwarden, Leipzig, Lille, Linköping, Linz, Lisboa, Liverpool, Livorno, Lyon, Maastricht, Madrid, Marseille, Milano, Modena, Montpellier, München, Næstved, Nantes, Newcastle, North East Lincolnshire, Norwich, Nottingham, Nürnberg, District of Parthenay, Porto, Orebro, Ronneby, Rotterdam, Salerno, Sheffield, Siena, Southampton, Strasbourg, Sunderland, Tameside, Tampere, Torino, Toulouse, Utrecht, Valencia, Venezia, Wageningen, Zarautz.
Members from the rest of Europe: Gdansk, Geneva, Iasi, Katowice, Korça, Lodz, Ostrava, Riga, Swarzedz, Vilnius.
Associate members: CIPAL (provinces Limburg and Antwerpen), Technopol Brussel-Bruxelles, Province de Liège, Oxfordshire County Council (observer).
Business representatives: BMP Multimedia, Bornholm Development Agency, Bull, ICL, Helsinki Telephone Company, BMP Multimedia, British Telecom, Ericsson, SUN Microsystems, Tunstall Group, Urba 2000, KT-Datacenter, 3Com Europe, Philips, Olivetti Telemedia, Novell, JMS Consulting, OÖ Datenhighway, Telecom Italia.
JOHN M. EGER
Biography
JOHN M. EGER, holder of the prestigious Lionel Van Deerlin Endowed Chair of Communications and Public Policy at San Diego State University, is president of the World Foundation for Smart Communities. He is also the founding director of the SDSU International Center for Communications which established the Japan-U.S. Telecommunications Research Institute with offices in Tokyo, New York, and San Diego; and the California Institute for Smart Communities, a million-dollar educational program to help communities statewide understand the importance of information technology as a catalyst for transforming life and work in the 21st century.
Earlier, Mr. Eger established and headed CBS Broadcast International and was senior vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group. From 1971 to 1973, he was legal assistant to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and from 1974 to 1976 served as telecommunications advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. Earlier in his career, Mr. Eger served as a data communications specialist and design director of information systems for the Bell System.
Mr. Eger currently serves as chairman of the board of the San Diego Data Processing Corporation; chairman of San Diego Mayor Susan Golding's City of the Future Advisory Committee; and chairman of Governor Wilson's newly established California Commission on Information Technology. In August 1997, Mr. Eger assumed the position of president and chief executive officer of the World Foundation for Smart Communities, a 501(c)(3) educational organization designed to help communities worldwide as they struggle to get on the global information highway.