Smart city as a complex adaptive system

As complexity of our political, social and economic environment increases, cities begin to experience new pressures, which makes the transformation from a conventional to a smart city urgent. It also requires re-thinking of what the key elements of the Smart City concept are. The paper does just that, and it provides an updated definition of Smart City. Further, it analyses problems experienced by urban conurbations caused by complexity of the Internet-based global economy and describes a practical solution - to design cities as complex adaptive systems capable of delivering services to citizens and visitors under conditions of complexity. The authors advocate an evolutionary transformation methodology that ensures a minimum of disruptions to city services. The concurrent design of multi-agent real-time schedulers for services and Smart City Ontology, described in this paper, enables the transformation to be carried out by several design teams, each, if necessary, at a different geographical location.