Smart Communities and Smart Cities: twin terms for implementing digitally enabled services for a better quality of life

Although the term Smart Cities has become more popular for the general public, the European Commission uses the terms smart cities and smart communities rather interchangeably, aimed at the well-being of their inhabitants, businesses, visitors, organisations and administrators (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/smart-cities-and-communities). Sometimes the term Smart Cities often refer to urban areas while smart communities consider rather rural and non-urban areas with the same purpose of ICT for quality of life.

The perspectives of the smart cities IoT market in Europe alone might reach a value around  84 billion euro (90.15 bn USD) by 2027, with annual growth rate of 15.75% according to Fiberroad (https://fiberroad.com/app/uploads/2022/08/European-Smart-Cities-Market-2022.pdf) . Even before, smart cities industry’s revenue might reach around 18.5 billion euro (20.05 bn USD) by the end of 2024 (according to Statista: https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/internet-of-things/smart-cities/europe). However, more than 60% of companies in Europe experienced difficulties in recruiting ICT specialists in 2021 as disclosed by Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=ICT_specialists_-_statistics_on_hard-to-fill_vacancies_in_enterprises#Employment_and_recruitment_of_ICT_specialists). In this context, the SMACITE project has provided a whole set of free MOOC on the different technical and professional aspects of Smart Cities through its LMS platform, thus facilitating the training of new specialists for the development of Smart Cities and Smart Communities.  

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