strong>Dr. Wolfgang G. Stock is professor for information science and head of the Information Science Department of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. His research activities und lectures comprise information retrieval, knowledge representation, informetrics, informational cities, social media and the markets of digital information. He is author of about 275 articles and of some basic text books in information science. Recently, he published (in cooperation with Mechtild Stock) the “Handbook of Information Science” (De Gruyter Saur, Paperback Ed. 2015). Additionally he is editor of the book series “Knowledge & Information. Studies in Information Science” (De Gruyter Saur).

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of information-related city research. Informational urbanism is an interdisciplinary endeavor incorporating on the one side computer science and information science and on the other side urbanism, architecture, (city) economics, and (city) sociology. In our research project on informational cities, we visited more than 40 metropolises and smaller towns all over the world. In this talk, we sketch the theoretical background on a journey from Max Weber to the Internet of Things, introduce our research methods, and describe main results on characteristics of informational cities as prototypical cities of the emerging knowledge society.