Smart Cities in Asia and the Challenges tothe Emergence of a Smart Continent

Gabriele De Luca1

1 Researcher, Department for e-Governance and Administration, Danube University Krems, Krems, Austria

アジアでも各地にスマートシティが登場している。これらをつないでスマート国家へ、さらにスマート大陸に発展させることは可能か。バルト3国の先進的な例を参照しつつ探った。

Abstract

With the emergence of Smart Cities in several urban areas in Asia, the problem arises on how to create networks of
independent intelligent cities that favour development and innovation, as opposed to inter-city competition. One
idea is to create Smart Nations in Asia first, and then connect them to one another in order to favour the emergenceof a more complex smart system; say, a Smart Continent. This is however unlikely to happen, because unity
between smart systems at a national level cannot be extended to the supranational level unless two factors arepresent simultaneously: political will of the humans towards globalisation, and a unified technological infrastructurethat allows communication between autonomous smart systems. In this paper, we analyse whether these two factors are present in Asia today. With regards to the human demand for political unity, it appears that politics in Asian
continues to be played under a game-theoretic perspective, which is based on the assumption that the relevant unitof analysis for politics is the State and that gains and losses are to be measured in relation to it. Concerning technology, the development of networks of innovation continues to take place under a state-centred perspective, as
opposed to the continental approach that is followed in Europe. We therefore argue that the next step in the increasein complexity of the smart systems will not follow continental boundaries, but rather political and technological.
Keywords

Smart Cities, networks of innovation, knowledge management, globalisation.

How do we make transition from smart cities tolarger smart societies
We can today observe the spread of smart cities
across all geographical regions of the planet, and thegrowing complexity of the telecommunication networkon which their information channels are based. The
same kind of enlargement for smart cities takes place
regardless of the continent, and it has been reported
both in Europe (Paskaleva, 2009), North America(Martin, Evans, & Karvonen, 2018), Latin America(Macke, Casagrande, Sarate, & Silva, 2018), and Asia
(Niculescu & Wadhwa, 2015). This expansion can referto the number of interconnected ICT devices (Cai,Cvetkovic, & Page, 2020), but it can also concern thenumber and classes of digital services for e-governance(Morandi, Rolando, & Di Vita, 2016), educational facilities and policies (Leorke, Wyatt, & McQuire, 2018),
and also economic and urban development (Bronstein,
2009; Kunzmann, 2014).
The observed expansion of smart cities, both in geographical terms and in terms of competences and services, is leading to the idea of a “scale-up” of the smart
city systems into larger systems (van Winden & van den
Buuse, 2017). Because the politico-administrative unitthat corresponds to the smart city is, of course, the city
itself, the literature discusses the transition from a smart
city to a larger smart unit in a manner analogous to thatof vertical transitions in hierarchies of the public047

Gabriele De Luca

administration. This is to say, certain authors discuss
the transition from smart city to smart regions (Morandi
et al., 2016), while others consider the transition to smart
nations (Hoe, 2016). The term smart region is somehow
fuzzy, though, and may refer to either the regional innovation clusters (Markkula & Kune, 2015), or to theregions as administrative units larger than the cities andsmaller than the state (Garau, 2015). The idea of a possible smart continent is also emerging, though it relates
for now to specific sectors such as the distribution ofelectric power over smart grids (Markovic, Zivkovic,
Branovic, Popovic, & Cvetkovic, 2013). Its extension tocover political units larger than the nation is not wellcovered by the literature on smart cities; however, we
can find discussions on the policies that larger politico-administrative bodies, such as the European Union,
have had in regards to policies that favour the cohesionof smart systems (McCann, 2015).
This discussion relates primarily to the scaling-up ofsmart cities in terms of their geographical boundaries.
In terms of the administrative body that manages it, thescaling-up would concern instead the municipal administration and the national government (Mellouli, LunaReyes, & Zhang, 2014). There is some discussion within
the context of regulatory theory on what would the smart
regulation aspects of globalization be (Gunningham &Sinclair, 2017), but this area of inquiry is still largely
unexplored.
However, as mentioned above, the expansion ofsmart cities across geographical space and the space ofcompetences is an empirical observation, which requiresa theoretical explanation. We can then ask ourselves thepreliminary question, as to what could come out of thecontinued observed expansion of smart cities, if thisprocess is extended for long enough. Further, because
we know that in a given geographical region, such as
Asia, multiple smart cities are present, it is worth exploring the possible dynamics that could characterize theinteraction between different smart cities in the processof their expansion. Political history suggests that the
expansion of political units is not necessary pleasant andthat it is often accompanied by violence (Siegel, 2011;
Taagepera, 1997; Woollacott, 2009). This is not a048

necessity though, as forms of political expansions thatare deprived of violence are also possible; the exampleof the European Union and its enlargement is the first
one that comes to mind (Chandler, 2007).
As a consequence, if we are expecting a certain typeof political systems to expand in the future, it is worth
investigating what type of expansion will it take. Notably,
we would like to know whether the expansion will
follow primarily competitive or cooperative lines withother analogous political systems that coexist with it.
A common term in the literature on political science
to refer to political systems such as cities or states is theword “polity”, which we can use here as a synonym for“political system” or “political communities”. It has
been noted in the literature on globalization that theindividual polities are merging into a larger global polity(Ougaard & Higgott, 2002). Smart cities, as a specialclass of polities that is characterized by a strong technological component, may or may not follow the same
dynamic trajectory. Instead, if any aggregation between
smart cities happened, this aggregation may end up following technological rather than political lines. If thatwere to happen, we would need to discuss the implications of a technological, and not politically driven,
expansion of a polity. This is important, especially inconsiderations of the relationship between politicalexpansion and violence that we introduced earlier. In
this paper, we therefore study the process of enlargement of the smart city polities in Asia, and analyse
whether it follows primarily technological or primarily
political directions.
How would a smart Asia look like: cooperation
versus competition in socio-technical systems
The choice of studying political and technologicalexpansion of smart cities in the Asian continent is particularly useful in comparison to, say, Europe, becauseof the large disunity of the polities of the former continent. A study of smart city expansion in Europe would
see that the technological and the political directions forthe expansion of polities is one and the same, because
the topology of the telecommunication network (Capone& Usman, 2015) and the topology of the polity (Celata &6th AFC Best Papers

Coletti, 2012) largely overlap. In Asia this is less thecase, and the regional forms of political aggregations,such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, tend tobe thematic rather than all-encompassing (Boland,2011). Further, the topology of the telecommunication
networks in Asia is far less dense than that of theEuropean Union, as we will discuss later. These two differences may make the study of vertical integration ofsmart cities in Asia an interesting case, to think about
how smart cities would aggregate “in the wild”; i.e.,
without a political system that encompasses all the othersmart cities living the same geographical area.
It has been argued that the process of transition froma given Asian smart city to a larger smart system, in anenvironment where many autonomous smart cities exist,
may take place along the lines of either cooperation orcompetition between those cities (Niculescu & Wadhwa,
2015). The dynamics of inter-city cooperation and competition are phenomena that are well studied when werefer to the traditional, analogic versions of the smart
cities (Taylor, 2011). They are however are lessresearched when we refer to their digital counterparts.
In relation to traditional cities, it has been argued thatthe dynamics of inter-city relations must necessarily
involve some measure of cooperation and some measureof competition (Begg, 1999; Taylor & Derudder, 2004).
Notice here that, if we think of cooperation and competition as two opposite poles of a spectrum of relational
strategies, the concrete observation of both cooperationand competition could be deducted aprioristically. Thisis because, if one of the two strategies were neverobserved in practice at least in some cases, the twopolarized concepts may have never appeared in themind of the human scientists that study the topic. This is
in fact a common argument in the literature on epistemology and philosophy of science (Barrotta & Dascal,
2005). Regardless of these epistemological considerations, we can however still assume that, if both cooperative and competitive strategies are possible forinter-smart city interaction, a bit of both will be observedin practice as we argued earlier. The reasons for this aretheoretically grounded in the literature on complex
adaptive systems; so we now have to take a step back,and look at a smart city as a socio-technical systemcomprising both a social and a technical component(Carvalho, 2015; Kopackova & Libalova, 2017). These
components have autonomous rules that dictate how
they cooperate and adapt with other analogous systems,
so we here analyse them separately and then merge them
together again.

Fig. 1. A smart city as a socio-technical system.

The political constraints, or “how does a political city
expand”
Because a smart city comprises also a politico-administrative unit, we could think that the process of its
expansion also follows the typical lines of growth ofpolitical systems. That is to say, we could think that the
expansion of a smart city takes place in a manner analogous to that of a city-state in Ancient Greece or Medieval
Europe, or in a manner similar to those of nation states
at a later time. If we do so, we are operating under theassumption that a smart city, for being a polity, also
expands according to the same principles that drive theenlargement of (non-smart) cities into larger politicalaggregates.
If this is the case, we can start by investigating theway in which a citadel in ancient history expands andthen transforms itself into a larger city-state (Thomas &Conant, 2003). This process begins with a stronger, fortified citadel within which the political, cultural, and religious rites of the community take place (De Polignac,
1995). The citadel receives the resources for its

049

Gabriele De Lucasustenance from the surrounding villages in the countryside. These resources include water, food, and personnel;
and in exchange for them, the citadel provides military
protection and safeguards the trade of commodities suchas oil and wine (Pratt, 2014). The expansion of the citadel
into a city-state then takes place by means of military or
cultural assimilation of the neighbouring citadels, which
led to the formation of politico-military alliances. The
prime example of this phenomenon is the Delian League
which was under the political control of Athens. The
original purpose of the League was to fight against thePersian empire (Larsen, 1940), and was thus finalized at
military conquest (Jackson, 1969). Athens with its Delian
League then engaged its historical rival, Sparta, which
led its own military alliance, the Peloponnesian League.
This led to a military confrontation that takes the nameof (the first) Peloponnesian War (Holladay, 1985).
Eventually the war ended with the surrender of Athens,
and Sparta came to lead the former Athenian empire aswell as its own.
For our purposes, we can say that the city-states inancient Greece have engaged in a cooperative processthat consisted in the formation of political alliances
between autonomous cities, where the one with superior
political strength would dominate the alliance’s policies.
This process was conditioned by the lack of competition
between a weaker city and a stronger one, which led to
the formation of military alliances led by the latter. We
can see that there is a competitive dynamic that takes
place in the behavior of this system. When two politicalsystems meet, such as cities or alliances, if they haveapproximately equal strength then they clash, and out of
their conflict emerges a victor that engulfs the loser.
Because we are studying smart cities as political systems centred around the city, we can imagine that thelines of their political expansion will follow the lines ofthe political boundaries set by the larger political systems
to which they belong. Then, autonomous political systems will either decide to merge into larger political systems, which constitutes cooperation, or will clash withother political systems, which constitutes competition.
It appears that politics in Asia continues to be played
under a game-theoretic perspective, which is based on

050

the assumption that the relevant unit of analysis for politics is the State and that gains and losses are to be measured in relation to it (Rauf, 2017). As a consequence, it
makes sense to consider the graph along which an hypothetical smart city would expand, as the network comprising the political and territorial boundaries between
Asian states. The image below represents the layout of
the network of Asian states, where the edges represent a
shared border between countries.

Fig. 2.	T he topology of the political land borders in Asia.
Graph edges from Wikipedia1; Island-states are not represented.
1

According to the political constraints that we studied
in this section, if a process of aggregation of smart cities
were to take place in Asia, this would need to happen
along the edges of the graph that is represented in theimage above.
The technological constraints, or “how does a researchand innovation network expand”
The smart city also comprises a technological component, in addition to the political one. The technologicalcomponent assumes the form of a research and
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_and_geographic_
borders (Accessed 9 March 2021)

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innovation network that handles the information andknowledge generation within the smart system(Komninos, 2008). This, in turn, comprises the ICT
infrastructure on which data for the IoT systems istransferred (Theodoridis, Mylonas, & Chatzigiannakis,2013), but also the research and innovation organisations, primarily in the ICT sector, that build and manage
the smart city devices and applications (van den Buuse& Kolk, 2019). In Asia, the development of networks ofinnovation continues to take place under a State-centred
perspective, as opposed to the continental approach
which is followed in Europe (Tseng, 2009). As a consequence, in order to identify the lines of development ofresearch and innovation networks in Asia it makes sense
to use the national research and innovation networks
and their linkages. The national research and innovation
networks include, of course, universities and their affiliated research organisations (Prokopenko, Holmberg, &Omelyanenko, 2018). Other nodes of the research andinnovation network may correspond, if we use the traditional helix model of innovation (Leydesdorff &Etzkowitz, 1998), to the government agencies thatmanage the smart cities.
These are not the only nodes in an innovation network, though. The literature on knowledge management
and innovation typically defines innovation networks as
including, among other things, also small and medium
enterprises (SMEs) (Mohannak, 2007). This implies
that these small and medium enterprises correspond tosome of the nodes in an innovation network associatedto a smart city.
For the purpose of mapping the research and innovation network around a smart city, however, the presenceof the small and medium enterprises in an innovation
network makes the network structure so complex thatthe study of the topology of Asian innovation networks
is too complex to be handled by us. This is because
small and medium enterprises can choose to delocalize
some or all of their activities, and therefore the place of
production or registration is not a good indication of thesystem on which the effects of their activities is produced, nor does it represent their network linkages. The
phenomenon of delocalization of small and medium

enterprises has been noted in Europe (Mariotti, 2005),
but also in Asia (Zhu & Pickles, 2014).
For this reason, we will consider instead the researchand innovation network as the network that comprises
universities and public administrations connected by
preferential telecommunication pathways for the transfer of data. These networks are called “national researchand education networks”, and ontologies that list anddescribe them have been compiled (Fryer, 2014).2 The
research and education networks in Asia, together with
their topologies and their international linkages, havebeen subject to previous studies to some extent (Janz &Kutanov, 2012; Shimizu, Nakashima, Okamura, &Tanaka, 2009). Not all research and education networks
are connected to one another, not directly at least.
Because not all research and education network are
directly connected to one another, and because these
networks are the ones in which the ICT component of
the smart cities is embedded, this has implications forthe ability by the latter to expand. This is because, if an
expansion of a smart city has to take place, this must
follow the links of the network on which the smart city
is embedded. If the network is not dense, then the expansion can only occur along the paths that are permissible
within that network.
We do not have, and could not find, a sufficiently
detailed network topology that depicts the links between
the research and education networks in Asia. We are
however going to make some theoretical considerations
regarding the expansion of a smart city over ICT networks, by using as an example the topology of theresearch and education networks in Europe. In Europe,
there exists in fact a pan-European research and education network, called Géant, which connects all the individual research and education networks from each
European member states. Its topology is public.3 By
studying its topology, we can learn about what potential

2 See also the relevant page on Wikipedia, at: https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/National_research_and_education_network (Accessed
9 March 2021)
3 https://www.geant.org/Networks/Pan-European_network/Pages/
GEANT_topology_map.aspx (Accessed 9 March 2021)

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Gabriele De Luca

expansions of a smart city cannot happen, because they
are not permissible paths within that network’s configuration. Let us take a couple of examples, in order to clarify this concept further; the information related to thiscomes from the documentation associated with the
public information campaign of the Géant network(GÉANT, 2018). Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all havetheir own national research and education networks,
which are further connected to one another, as we will
see shortly. These networks are: the EENet, SigmaNet,and LITNET, respectively. There is a network link
between the Estonian EENet and the Latvian SigmaNet,
as well as between the Lithuanian LITNET and theLatvian SigmaNet. There is however not link between
the Estonian EENet and the Lithuanian LITNET, whichmeans that the communication through the two networks has to occur through an intermediary nodelocated in Latvia. See the picture below for a clarification on the network structure in the Baltic States.

Fig. 3. The topology of research and education networks in
the Baltic states and their connections.

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, are both smart cities (Etoke, Kvieskienė,& Goksel, 2018; Julsrud & Krogstad, 2020). Riga, thecapital of Latvia, is also a smart city (Aleksandrs, Jurgis,
Kristina, & Anatolijs, 2014). If Riga as a smart city were
to expand into a larger smart region, this could happen052

with the inclusion of either Tallinn or Vilnius into its
own ICT system. There exists, in fact, a network linkthat allows the transfer of the data and the delivery ofservices between the two respective networks. If however Tallinn wanted to expand towards Vilnius, or
Vilnius towards Tallinn, this could not immediately
happen due to the absence of a network link that connects. The expansion from Tallinn towards Vilnius andfrom Vilnius towards Tallinn should therefore happen
with the inclusion of Riga first, and the other city second.
We can abstract from the previous case study in orderto determine the characteristics of an expansion of asmart city in relation to its network topology. More generally, the idea is that, if a network link exists between
two smart cities in the ICT network where their data andthe services are transferred, it is then in principle possible to create a larger smarter system that encompasses
them both. This principle is agnostic to the specific geographical location that is relevant for any given smart
city, but it is however geographically bounded by the
topology of a network that is present in a given area.
Now, regarding Asia and the topology of the national
research and education networks. As we mentioned earlier, there is no unique, continental research and education network, analogous to Géant in Europe or Internet
2 in North America. There are however several dozen
research and education networks, each belonging to anindividual Asian nation.4 A comparatively larger researchand education network also exists, though, which
encompasses China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
and Tajikistan.5 This network has been studied throughsocial network analysis, and it appears to be centeredaround China and Russia (Wang & Sun, 2015). This lets
us conclude that the expansion of a smart city belonging
to one of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation could only take place along the link thatconnects Russia and China.
4 See footnote 3, above.
5 This is the website of the University of Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation, which acts as the organizational and legal framework for the exchanges in the research and educational sector
between its member states: http://www.uni-sco.ru/ (Accessed 9
March 2021).

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Another form of cooperation between Asian researchand education networks is the SERENE program (World
Bank, 2010). In its original formulation, it was supposed
to establish the network connections between some 17
research and education centers; Around 7 of them werelocated in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia,
and Ireland, while the remaining ones were properly
South Asian. The recent reports seem to indicate thatknowledge exchanges along that network are taking
place with increasingly higher frequency (World Bank,2019); it is not clear, however, whether the infrastructure
for data transfer and service delivery that is needed for asmart city is present or not. For this paper, we will
simply assume that, if the infrastructure for large bandwidth communication will be developed in the SERENE
countries in the future, then that one, too, could be apath along which the development of large smart systems could take place.
If more studies on the topology of the connections
between research and education networks in Asia will
be conducted in the future, then the consideration madeabove might in principle be extended to countries otherthan those that comprise the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation or the SERENE network. The general rulethat we learn by the considerations we performed in thisparagraph is that another constrain on the emergence ofa smart Asia exists, in addition to the political layout of
the continent. This comprises the topology of the Asian
research and education networks and, more specifically,
the existence of links that allow communication between
any two of them.
The political and technological constraints to theemergence of a Smart Asia
In the previous sections we have identified two partially overlapping sets of constraints that determine thepossibility by a smart continent in Asia to emerge, out ofseveral independent smart cities. These are laid on thepolitical and on the technological network in which thesmart cities are embedded. After these considerations,
we can now define what competitive and cooperative
forces would look like, on the political and technological layers on which the emergence of a Smart Asia cantake place.
On the political layer, cooperation corresponds to thecreation of regional organisations that possess the characteristics of statehood that are now held by the Asian
nation-states; à-la European Union. In network terms,
this is represented by the replacement of a group of
nodes or vertices of the political network, with a single
node that takes on the political functions of the previous
ones. We do not consider possible network effects thatlead to the creation of new links or edges between existing member states, because this can happen only withmodifications to the territorial composition of the states
themselves. If that were to happen, the most likely scenario is that of catastrophic collapse of the politicalsystem (Kuecker, 2007), which could hardly be considered a form of cooperation.
On the technological layer, instead, cooperation may
as well be manifested by the establishment of new links.
This is because, while the political state is characterized
by a certain rigidity of its territorial boundaries, thetechnological boundaries of a research and education
network are more flexible. Concretely, the forms ofcooperation on that layer would correspond to the creation of dedicated nodes for the connection and thetransmission of data and services between two previously disconnected research and education networks.
The desirable continuation of this research is the
mapping of the network links existing between Asian
research and education networks, because that would
allow the identification of the structure of the network
along which a larger smart system could be built. The
policy implication for this paper consists in the idea thatthe promotion of agreements for data and information
sharing among national research and education networks could be beneficial. This type of measure would
not only improve the output of the scientific productionof the countries involved, but also create the conditions
according to which the aggregation of smart cities intolarger systems could take place later.

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Gabriele De Luca

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