Korea's Smart CityThis primer aims to share the knowledge and experiences of smart city planning and development in Korea. The brand name for Korean smart cities, U-City, combines the word ‘city’ with the term ‘ubiquitous’. A U-City system is categorized by three stages: information collection, information processing, and information utilization. In the mid-2000s, Korea adopted the concept of a smart city for the first time in the world, in order to improve the quality of urban life and comprehensively manage an intelligent city system. Since the nation enacted the U-City Act in 2008, it has systematically built smart cities under the U-City brand.