Digital City vs. Smart City: a fuzzy debate.

The conceptualisations of digital city and smart city are several and sometimes they overlap one another. They share the idea of ICT interventions in urban and metropolitan contexts to achieve a higher quality of life and better services. The two conceptualisations are considered as connected by some authors, as they state ‘smart city’ is an evolution of ‘digital city’. Some other literati are not aligned with these meanings, so the aim of this work is to depict the usage of both terms and their connections. In order to achieve this goal we perform a content analysis based on reports issued by both Central and Local Institutions, and big corporations operating in this quite new business context. The results show the distinction between ‘digital city’ and ‘smart city’ in the reports and the cases in which the public institutions make the two notions collapsing. Moreover we focus on the evolutionary path proposed in literature through the usage of the several labels linked to a city and all reports demonstrate an alignment to such a relation.