Smart-City Development Paths: Insights from the First Two Decades of Research

Abstract

More than 20 years have now passed since the concept of smart city first appeared in a scholarly publication, marking the beginning of a new era in urban innovation. Since then, the literature discussing this new concept and the ICT-oriented urban-innovation approach it stands for has been growing steadily, along with the number of initiatives that cities all over the world have launched to pursue their ambition of becoming smart. However, current research still falls short of providing a clear understanding of smart cities and the scientific knowledge policy makers and practitioners both need to deal with their progressive development. In response to this shortfall, this paper offers a bibliometric study of the first two decades of smart-city research, whereby citation link-based clustering and text-based analysis are combined to: (1) build and visualize the network of scholarly publications shaping the intellectual structure of the smart city research field; (2) identify the clusters of thematically related publications; and (3) reveal the emerging development paths of smart cities that these clusters support and the strategic principles they embody. This study uncovers five main development paths: the Experimental Path; the Ubiquitous Path; the Corporate Path; the European Path; and the Holistic Path. Overall, this analysis offers a comprehensive and systematic view of how a smart city can be understood theoretically and as a scientific object of knowledge able to inform policy-making processes.

Ecosystems for smart cities: tracing the evolution of governance structures in a dutch smart city initiative

“…Extensive research in related fields has shown that in the close interaction between actors tacit and informal knowledge is exchanged, which is essential for building relationships and generating trust (Hoogma et al 2002). Communication also helps to reduce uncertainty and complexity that are inherent in radical innovation projects such as smart city initiatives (Hollands 2008;Romijn 2008a, 2008b;Mora et al 2017).…”

“…Cobben and Roijakkers 2019;Stam 2015: Pop et al 2018, and the smart city literature (e.g. Schaffers et al 2011;Lee et al 2014;Mora et al 2017;Fernandez-Anez et al 2018).…”

The Advent of Practice Theories in Research on Sustainable Consumption: Past, Current and Future Directions of the Field

“…This approach has been applied in several fields to explore static and dynamic structures of the academic research. Bibliometric mapping techniques deliver a visual delineation of the state of the art in a field of research, but can also be used to provide orientation for scientists in developing their area of interest on a certain topic, potentially representing inspiration for future theoretical and practical approaches to expand a certain field of the literature [37][38][39][40][41].…”

Strategic principles for smart city development: A multiple case study analysis of European best practices

“…According to Albino et al (2015) and Meijer and Bolivar (2016), despite the intervening growth of research on smart city development, these disagreements on what such a development represents are still firmly entrenched in the scientific literature. The validity of this claim has been proved by 2018a;2018b) and Komninos and Mora (2018), with a series of bibliometric analyses that reveal the presence of a deep-rooted division in the research on smart cities: a division which surfaces as four dichotomies questioning how smart city development should be approached.…”

“…The research from 2018a;2018b) and Komninos and Mora (2018) demonstrates that these dichotomies are significant, because they generate divergent hypotheses on what principles drive smart city development and the strategies assembled to enable it. As they note, this division introduces uncertainty over the implementation of strategies for supporting smart city development and reveal a critical knowledge gap that this paper starts filling by means of a multiple case study analysis.…”