Over the last couple of decades, metropolitan areas around the world have been engaged in a multitude of initiatives aimed at upgrading urban infrastructure and services, with a view to creating better environmental, social and economic conditions and enhancing cities' attractiveness and competitiveness. Reflecting these developments, many new categories of 'cities' have entered the policy discourse:

Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for "smart city." Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, first, the presence of a strong globalizing narrative which emphasizes world cities as "best practice" models. Second, they reveal the smart city's association-beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes-with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy, and practice.

Place branding is seriously studied in various academic disciplines. Its impact on strategic development plays a vital role in processes of sustainable urban transformation. Place branding originated in tourism management and over time its research focus spilled over and evolved in environmental science, urban studies and public administration. Scholars and policy makers are currently faced with a myriad of concepts in place branding research, which show considerable overlap but should be carefully distinguished from each other. To increase our understanding of this body of research, this article observes a strong pattern of the concepts in use, in their references to location types (i.e., urban, city, destination, place) and broadcasting activities (branding, marketing, promotion). It builds on this observation by collecting studies from the Scopus database by location type and broadcasting activities (LT–BA) reference pairs and systematically analysing and reviewing these from 1980 to 2018. A total of 2665 articles and reviews were identified and analysed based on (1) occurrences per reference pair, (2) co-occurrences per reference pair, and (3) co-occurrences for each reference pair with other concepts. On that basis, the origin and evolution of the research field including multiple reference pairs in use is explored and described.

PurposeThe aim of this research is to better understand the decisions in infrastructure asset management at public agencies and the challenges of these agencies to improve the effectiveness of their decision making.Design/methodology/approachBased on a literature review on asset management at public agencies, a case study was used to investigate the decision making of a provincial agency in The Netherlands. A total of 12 semi‐structured interviews with employees of the agency were conducted, amended by an analysis of policy documents, maintenance contracts, inspection reports, and planning documents.FindingsThe research revealed that key challenges to achieving effective infrastructure asset management are: the establishment of alignment between infrastructure objectives, situation and intervention; the formulation of infrastructure objectives; and the management of multiple actors with different interests.Practical implicationsPublic agencies should pay more attention to clearly defined infrastructure objectives which are consistent with the agencies' strategic policy goals and interests of multiple stakeholders. That also includes that public agents need to develop new skills and knowledge to cope with the various challenges of effective infrastructure asset management.Originality/valueThe research clustered decisions in infrastructure management into three decision areas and showed that effectiveness of the decision making is constituted through the interrelationship of these areas and depends on clearly defined objectives.

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