EUROPEAN COMMISSION Directorate General XIII 4 th European Digital Cities Network Conference: Changing Patterns Virtual Urban Europe Virtual Urban Europe: reality and potentials

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Directorate General XIII

4th European Digital Cities Network Conference: Changing Patterns of Urban Life, conference proceedings pp. 140-47; OOPEC: Brussels

(available also at: www.edc.eu.int/in-action/salzburg.html, session 4b)

Fourkas, Vassilys

Virtual Urban Europe

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Virtual Urban Europe: reality and potentials Vassilys Fourkas

Dept.of Planning & Landscape University of Manchester

Introduction

One of the main elements of the ‘virtual geography’ (Batty, 1997) as the geography of the ‘culture of real virtuality’ (Castells, 1997), is the rapid development and function of digital or virtual cities on the cyberspace through the global network of Internet. Till now more than 1000 European cities are represented on the Internet through various types of web sites. But, although the rapidly increased construction and operation of hundreds European city web sites, which are promoted and supported by all levels of public administration as well as private bodies, little is known on their operational characteristics, about what exactly European digital cities are – or pretend to – offering to citizens/users with their web sites. Early research suggests that no more than 10% of the EU city web sites can be referred as ‘holistic digital cities’, therefore city web sites which are ‘informative’ as well as ‘participative’ (Aurigi, 1997). In the same time, local authorities have the leading role in the development of EU city web sites (Kluzer and Farinelli, 1997), while in USA city governments are not assuming a lead role in developing digital city applications (Nunn and Rubleske, 1997).

Map 1. The EU country-members according to the number of cities that are connected to the City.Net network (www.city.net), υ: selected sample of [digital] cities

The present work concerns with aims to a comparative assessment of EU cities' presence on the Internet. Of course it is not ambitious to cover all the aspects but it is ambitious to give a complementary and extensive to the above mentioned two relevant studies. So, a random sample of 60 EU cities1 official web sites have been investigated and the corresponding

1 28 of them have population from 100,000 to 500,000 (Group 1), 20 of them have 500,000-1,000,000 (Group 2), and finally 12 of them have 1 to 3 million inhabitants (Group 3).

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Number of EU cities' web sites

66 to 162 (4)28 to 66 (4)21 to 28 (2)

1 to 21 (5)

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webmasters have been questioned attempting to identify the basic characteristics of the arisen EU urban virtual geography.

The basic factors and actors

The main factors and actors that are contributing to the development of European digital cities, have been identified as follows: (a) The increased emphasis put by local authorities on the operation of the ‘digital town hall’, streamlined supply of public services, better interaction with citizens and local firms and in few cases on the development of local virtual communities. (b) The use of Internet for city marketing-oriented purposes, concerning mainly the tourist and business fields, which attracted the interest of both public and authorities and private companies, especially ISP companies. (c) The rapid development of ICTs raises the need for wide partnerships between private and public sector, so that digital cities’ applications could fully exploit the potential of new interactive and Virtual Reality technologies. Universities, research centres and local ISPs play a critical role in these partnerships as they provide the means to maintain and further advance the applied technologies, examining also the economic and social benefits and costs of these applications.

More specifically, the digital presence of a city through municipal web sites is directed: 42% by Departments of International or Public Relations and Press Offices; 26% by recently established ‘Internet Offices’ or ICT Departments; 23% by a ‘digital city office’ which has been established for the web site’s management; 7% operated by ‘Departments for Economic Development’ and 2% by Departments of Culture.

The basic economic characteristics

Concerning the cost of the city web site establishment, only 20 out of 60 webmasters answered the related question. Surprisingly, the answers given were varied from null (Venezia.Net) to ECU 1,293,000 (£ 845,000, Bremen OnLine). Except from null, the lowest price reported was ECU 6,500 (£ 10,100, Strasbourg), and in average the cost was ECU 226,440 (approx. £ 148,000). As Table 1 illustrates, 28 out of 30 webmasters answered that the digital cities are not profit initiatives while only 2 confirm that the digital cities are profit-driven – the municipal web site of Bordeaux and the private Cagliari OnLine.

Table 1. Answers given by 30 webmasters on the economics of European digital cities (January 1998).

The city web site is…

Financially viable

Profit - seeking Including Advertisements

Yes 40% 6% 6%

No 37% 94% 70%

Intended - - 24%

No answer 23% - -

However, the financial viability is mostly based on funds and not on direct income. The multi-awarded Bremen.online, for example, is heading towards privatisation while the managers of 7 out of 30 digital cities, such as the municipal initiatives of Bologna-Iperbole, Torino-STP and the private initiative of Virtual Manchester, are considering to include advertisements in the web sites’ contents, attempting to make the digital cities self-supported. More than 40% of the sampled digital cities have been funded by the EU, through their participation in several of the relevant European programmes and projects.

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The primary aims, problems and future plans

First, it has to be noted that 70% of the webmasters consider that the digital city’s operation is oriented both for external and internal use, aiming to promote the city’s profile as well as to be useful to local people. Besides, they classified the importance of basic topics that a digital city must cover in order to be an effective tool for both the above aims. Tourism and culture topics have the highest score, obviously regarding the city-marketing purposes, followed by local government and public services topics which concern mainly city-governance related aims. Technological and environmental topics are far the topics with the lower score.

Besides, according to webmasters, the main issues of operating a digital city are: (a) real participation and ‘sense of belonging’ in the on-line community, (b) interactive and effective dialogue with politicians and public administrations, (c) real and secure delivery of useful services, (d) shared and built together resources (information, services, technologies, standards etc), (e) user friendly and intuitive interface and ways of interaction, and (f) surveys and continuous feed-back analysis of user needs and validation (quality control).

Finally, in the question on the potential plans for the further development of the digital cities, the vast majority of webmasters’ answers refer to increase of interactive services offered, in particular through simple designed interactive interfaces/maps. 65% of answers concern also plans for the better categorisation of information provided.

Preliminary demographic characteristics

Digital cities in Europe, as the urban metaphor on the Internet, have similar demographic characteristics to the global Internet ‘population’. According to webmasters’ answers visitors in European digital cities are: in their vast majority males. 50% of the visitors, are people from other countries, 25% from the same country but

different city and 25% from the city itself. 70% of visitors are between 23-40, 20% between 17-23 and only 10% more than 40. Concerning the visitors’ profession 30% are from the business field, 22% are students,

12% are academics, 12% are from public organisations, 14% individuals connected from home computers, and 10% have various other professions.

The average of visits per week is 25,400 and the daily average of messages sent to webmasters is 142.

According to the hourly and weekly web server statistics of Bologna-Iperbole and Virtual Manchester there is a remarkable decrease (35%) of visits during weekends and 50% of visits are taking place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., which are working and open Universities hours. Therefore, this confirms that the overwhelming proportion of digital cities’ visiting activity takes place at work or in work-related conditions.

Information services and interactive electronic capabilities offered by city web sites

First, it has to be noted that the 70% of the sampled web sites were updated within the previous week, while 22% were last updated within the previous month, and the rest 8% have not been updated at all the previous month. In addition, the results from the survey that addressed the webmasters of 30 digital cities indicated that 6 out of 10 web sites are updated daily, while the rest are updated at least once a month.

Some thematic categories appear more often compared to others in the contents of the cities' web sites. For instance information that concerns with timetables of local busses and trains appear in 48 web sites, while information for the current public works in the city appears only in 6. The ten more often cited thematic applications are presented in Table 2.

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Table 2. The ten more and the ten less frequently appeared thematic applications in the sample of 60 EU cities' web sites

TOP 10: Leisure /events, tourist attractions lists , socio-historical overview, local

literature/magazines/newspapers, travel information services, local authorities contact directories, useful telephone numbers and addresses directory, universities, maps, and local transport information.

BOTTOM 10: Tele-working, tele-education, on-line planning2, public works in the city, schools and broader education, political organisations/parties, transportation schedules and traffic infrastructure, national government and parliament, voting elections, SMEs' services/networks.

The thematic categories of culture and tourism are the most commonly included in the web sites of the European cities followed by general information services and information related to local authority structure and activities. In particular, information that concerns the history of the city, cultural events and tourist sights are included in all the web sites of the sample in a lesser or greater degree. In 42 out of 60 web sites, these two thematic categories are interrelated presented and they constitute the basic items of the on-line tourist marketing of the city. Issues concerning typical urban problems and the everyday life in the city such as crime reports, racial and social tensions, homelessness and poverty, pollution etc. are usually ignored.

The analysis of data obtained from the survey conducted indicate that in most of the cases digital cities provide a wide range of information services which basically refer to a series of issues that concern city-marketing, various public interests and queries, urban planning, policy and governance. In few cases they are claiming to be more interactive and socially inclusive as new electronic public spaces. Similarly, services of electronic commerce are included in only 13 out of 60 web sites with noticeable low contribution of the local market. Therefore, on the basis of the survey’s findings, and mainly based on the of the web sites’ content analysis results, Table 3 illustrates the identified basic types of European digital cities.

Table 3. The basic types of European city web sites, January 1998 : included : not included : semi-included3

On-line City Brochure

On-line City Guide

Digital Town Hall

Digital City Arena

Civic Information Network

Integrated Digital City

DESCRIPTIVE Tourism Culture Education Economy Technology Environment Local Authorities City Planning General Information INTERACTIVE E-mail to L. Auts. On-line forms On-line notice board Interactive maps Virtual debate forum Web–pages & e-mail

2 Information for planning applications in the city using advanced software such as VRML and GIS. 3 Semi-included: Means that either the info-category is not included to all web sites of a digital city type or that is included but in obviously insufficient way.

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Similar research in the area (Aurigi, 1997), although followed a different methodological framework, it indicated 7 types of digital cities which are quite equivalent to the above presented categorisation of European digital cities. What Aurigi calls ‘holistic digital city’ - as the digital city which is informative, participative and grounded - is similar to what we call in this research ‘integrated digital city’, and he as well estimated that the percentage of this digital city’s type is relatively low across Europe, at, approximately, 10%” (Aurigi, 1997: 99).

Digital cities' contents and the geography of real cities

The research clearly indicates that the population size of the cities' does not determine and does not influence in a great degree the type of contents/services included in the web sites. On the other hand, the 'urban virtual geography' of the EU is characterised by remarkable differences between the country-members, while the most significant difference is observed between North and South. Figure 1 illustrates the insufficiency of information on most of the categories except from the culture and tourist related thematic categories.

Figure 1. The two groups (North, South) and their content analysis

Scandinavian countries and Netherlands present the highest percentages of cities and municipal authorities’ representation on the Internet, developing also the most integrated digital cities experiments in EU. Italy is the great exception between the Mediterranean countries developing civic networks characterised by the offering of interactive public services to citizens. UK, Germany, Austria and Belgium have a high rate of on-line cities and municipal authorities but they do not so interactive as the Scandinavian and Dutch projects. The on-line presence of French cities is still in its early stages (because of the Minitel operation). Besides, characteristic is the external orientation (marketing) of the web sites that represent the Alpic Arc (e.g. Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Munich, Lyon, and Vienna), and the Capitals Centre (e.g. Liege, Charleroi, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, and Lille). Central Mediterranean (Greece and south Italy) cities have far the poorest representation on the Web.

Conclusions and Implications

This research introduces a kind of methodological framework to the process of appraisal of the digital cities’ development and operation, aiming to contribute to the study of the arisen virtual geography. Therefore, attempting to address the substantial lack of empirical evidence on how EU cities have been extended to the cyberspace it has to be noted that three are the

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identified main areas that digital cities are currently concerned with and can have a potential: tourist promotion of the city linked to cultural, in particular entertainment, issues, and the ‘Digital Town Hall’ as the on-line presence of local authorities providing information services or communicating and offering advanced services to citizens through the Internet. Furthermore, the demographics of 30 web sites indicate that the grounded attribute or ‘quality’ of the digital cities does not significantly involves the local community, as the 70% of ‘visitors’ are from other places and the majority of them from other countries.

It seems that the identified uneven urban development on the web is directly connected with the corresponding regional uneven development in the EU. The present difference between cities which are R&D centres with latest telecommunication infrastructure, and relatively high percentage of on-line population and those cities that do not have the above advantages determine the degree of inequalities between their digital analogies. Fact that increase rather than undermine the European programmes’ role towards a more balanced ‘virtual urban development’ in EU, trying to avoid the phenomenon of ‘off-line’ European territories.

Concluding, it can be argued that, aims and objectives that webmasters express and EU policy address through the plethora of relevant programmes, need further consideration, especially concerning the issue of the inclusiveness of all city's aspects in the formation of a city’s web infrastructure. Besides, the rapidly increased commercialisation of the Internet and the remarkable intention of webmasters to, partly, commercialise the cities’ web sites in order to make them self-supported and/or even profitable, indicates that digital cities are still far from the purpose to operate as ‘urban electronic public space’. Consequently, the ‘Virtual Community Renaissance’ scenario (Kluzer and Farinelli, 1997) seems to be driven more by the funding-seeking and the marketing-oriented initiatives then by bottom-up experiments. Therefore it would be utopian to argue that this scenario is the best and only chance for a balanced social and economic growth towards the European Information Society.

That is why further research is absolutely needed to examine, map out and evaluate in-depth case studies concerning the formation of specific city-web infrastructures. For this reason, the case study of the present PhD project is ambitious to contribute to virtual geography studies by exploring, mapping out and evaluating the web-profile of a characteristic EU post-industrial city (Manchester) and its relation and potential to “urban regeneration” efforts and plans. It may be soon to evaluate Digital Manchester on its various long-term goals, but it is certainly appropriate to monitor and assess its progress towards these goals.

REFERENCES

- 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. - Batty, Michael (1997): Virtual Geography, Futures, Vol 29, No 4/5, May/June 1997, pp. 337 – 352. - Castells, Manuel (1997): The Network Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford: Blackwell. - Kluzer, Stefano and Farinelli, Marco (1997): A Survey of European cities’ Presence on the Internet, Working paper No 31, Databank Consulting: ACTS; FAIR: Milan. - Nunn, Samuel and Rubleske, B. Hoseph (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 1997, pp: 53 – 80.

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A Few Words About the Author: Vassilys Fourkas is a PhD researcher (2nd

year) at the Department of Planning and Landscape in the University of Manchester, and he is funded by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y).

He graduated in Civil Engineering at the Aristotle University of Salonica in 1993 and he then followed a post-graduate research programme in the area of use of computer-simulation techniques in planning, at the University of Venice-Dept. of Architecture-DAEST/Italy.

His research focuses on the (urban) virtual geography in EU and especially on the formation and function of city web infrastructure and topology.

Keywords:

PhD research, questionnaires, content analysis, digital cities, webmasters, virtual urban geography, European Union.

Contact Details: Vassilys Fourkas

Department of Planning and Landscape

University of Manchester

M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

Tel: ++ 44 161 275 6869

Fax: ++ 44 161 275 6893

E-mail: [email protected]