Comparing Research Streams on Smart City and Sustainable City

Abstract

Nowadays, the issues connected to the new configurations of urban contexts are gaining more and more space both in management literature and in city managers’ agendas towards the conceptualization of “smart city”. More recently, sustainability has acquired even more relevance in smartization interventions as a goal to reach in the long term. The pivotal role of sustainability led to a new perspective acquiring relevance, namely the “sustainable city” as a new way to approach to the resources’ management of a city and to the implementation of services, both old ones and innovative ones. In order to investigate if the new topic could be considered as an evolution of the previous, the authors performed a multi-level analysis starting from a bibliometric analysis to investigate on the ties between smart and sustainable aiming to understand if these two topics are related from the scholars’ point of view and which are the possible connections. A content analysis on official reports issued by 17 out of 30 industry players listed on the Navigant Research Report 2014, as they are involved in the most advanced smart city projects, is aiming to observe the connections between smart city features and each of the three dimensions of sustainability. The results from the first step of the investigations show that, as the labels previously examined, it is not easy to define this more recent conceptualization, because it is still hard to observe it from an all-inclusive point of view; following in the comparison between the “characteristics” of a smart city and the three dimensions of sustainability—economic, environmental, and social—the results led to consider the economic domain as the most relevant one when debating about sustainability.