Exploring Paths toward Knowledge Cities Developments: A Research Agenda

Background

The “Knowledge City” (KC) concept is a subfield of Knowledge-Based Development (KBD) and refers to all aspects of social, economic and cultural life of a city. It can be defined as follows: “A Knowledge City is the term used to describe a KBD strategy that has as target to enhance and continuously support the knowledge management processes that take place in an urban area. This is achieved through the continuous interactions of knowledge agents among them as well as with the knowledge agents of other cities, so as knowledge continuously flows. The successful formulation of strategy, the shaping of a coherent vision, the advanced communication networks, the city’s infrastructures and the citizen’s education level continuously support these interactions” (Ergazakis et al., 2004). The term “knowledge agent” refers to any entity (human, organisation, company, university, technology park, research centre etc.) that manage knowledge. The definition of the KC concept is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The knowledge city concept, adapted by Ergazakis et al. (2004)

The reader can refer to Ergazakis et al. (2004, 2006a) for further details on the different views regarding KCs as well as on their benefits.

Taxonomy Of Kc Research

As already mentioned, the field of KC has begun to attract the interest of researchers only recently. A review of the KCs-related literature reveals that since this concept is new, its real success is still under investigation in the research community. There is little, in terms of development and assessment, frameworks for KCs, and consequently little consensus regarding the design requirements and the development parameters for building a successful KC (Carrillo, 2004). In what follows, the authors attempt to briefly present the status of research per each major theme related to KCs and, in the end, to synthesize the results.