Assessment of the Impact of Smart City Initiatives on the Development of Urbanized Territories

Abstract

Digitalization processes are penetrating deeper into various areas of urbanized territories, being a factor affecting the quality of life of the local population. One of the promising approaches for the development of urban areas in the context of digitalization is the concept of the smart city. Despite the significant popularity of the smart city concept among the scientific community, as well as municipal authorities, the impact of digitalization processes on the development of the urban environment, as well as the possibility of using digital technologies to solve emerging problems in the economic, social, and environmental spheres, has been studied very little. The aim of the study is to determine the dependencies between the implementation of smart city model initiatives and the development of individual subsystems of the urban environment. The paper shows that a significant part of modern research is of theoretical, descriptive nature, while there is a shortage of empirical research, the main purpose of which would be to identify quantitative patterns in the development of smart cities, which would contribute to the development of economic and mathematical approaches to the study of urbanized territories in the conditions of formation digital society. The research method used by the authors is correlation analysis. Using the cases of 118 cities from the Smart City Index 2021, prepared by the Singapore Institute of Technology and Design, the relationship between the implementation of ideas for the digitalization of the urban environment and improving the quality of individual components of the urban environment is shown. As a result of the study, strong correlations were identified between the introduction of digital technologies in the main areas of the urban economy and the development of the urban environment, the hypothesis about the impact of digitalization processes on the development of certain areas of management within urban areas was confirmed, relationships between the development of smart solutions within the urban environment and changes in quality were shown. life of the local population. The results obtained can become the basis for further research in the development of smart cities, as well as applied tools for the implementation of plans and strategies for the development of urban areas.