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The smart city concept is often simply considered equivalent only to technology. This paper starts by introducing the necessity of a holistic, integrated, and multidisciplinary approach to the concept of smart cities. Smart cities are evolving by the creation of tools that are application specific; therefore, European classification of smart city applications will be reviewed (as authors have used these criteria to classify the analyzed applications) and the relationship between the different European smart classification standards are analyzed. Moreover, in order to see how reality aligns with the theoretical concept of smart cities, the authors analyzed 61 applications from 33 smart cities distributed in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. From these, 16 specific applications from eight cities have been selected and described in detail so they provide an overview of existing tools in different application areas, as defined by European standards. After showing actual smart cities, the concepts and steps for building future smart cities are suggested in a conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]