It aims to support improved management of cities and to achieve long-term physical, social and economic sustainability by bringing together unconnected sources of information in one place, and making that place available in digital space to everyone, from city planners, building developers, politicians, to individual citizens.
Published in Chapter:
The Challenge of Designing User-Centric E-Services: European Dimensions
Patrizia Lombardi (Politecnico di Torino, Italy), Ian Cooper (Eclipse Research Consultants, UK), Krassimira Paskaleva-Shapira (Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe Gmbh, Germany), and Mark Deakin (Napier University - Scotland, UK)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-282-4.ch024
Abstract
Harnessing ICTs effectively is one of the main vehicles for achieving the EU’s 2010 strategy to become the most competitive digital knowledge-based economy. Achieving this requires innovation and a process of cultural, structural, and economical change towards the so-called eAgora. This requires that citizens are at the center of attention in the design of civic on-line developments in terms of accessibility. This chapter identifies significant challenges to the design of such user-centric e-services, by illustrating some key results of the European Union (EU) IST Framework 6 research project - IntelCities (2004). It presents the City e-governance framework developed in the research project and it shows how the contents of cities’ existing Web sites do not completely satisfy the expectations of the OECD in the European cities visited by the IntelCities Roadshows. It indicates a consistent way forward for the development of the online services offered by the IntelCities e-learning platform. The chapter closes by querying whether either the European cities examined or their citizens have the appetite for the proposed eAgora that will be necessary for its effective implementation and operation.