The Smart City journey: a systematic review and future research agenda

Abstract

This study presents a systematic review of the literature of 84 articles and books (1997–2020) dealing with the concept and processes of Smart Cities worldwide. It identifies and analyses the three main perspectives: (a) the techno-centric perspective, (b) the humanist perspective and (c) the collaborative perspective and proposes a novel perspective thereof. It shows that, although there is still a lack of consensus on the subject, some of the definitions of Smart Cities, particularly the more comprehensive ones, seem to be moving in the right direction, in line with our perspective, bringing technology closer to people and at the same time integrating it into a new system of systemic, multi-dimensional, multi-actor and multi-level local governance in a network. Future studies could focus on analysing the results of the processes of transforming cities into Smart Cities and producing more quantitative work, given the predominance of qualitative case studies in this area.