Reassessing smart city components: An overview of the dynamic nature of smart city concept

Abstract

Cities all over the world are in search for a sustainable solution to address the problems associated with urbanization. Holistic smart cities have a multidimensional point of view for future cities. This paper pools components of smart cities and deconstructs the complicated holistic smart cities. The pooled data comes from 29 studies, consisting of 23 performance evaluation schemes and 6 indicator sets that cover 15 countries plus 6 broad geographic regions. On the basis of recurrent themes amongst smart city components, we categorize the components into 9 sub categories and 3 main categories. The results verify that the 6 predetermined components namely, Economy, People, Environment, Mobility, Living and Governance are inalienable from the holistic approach. Novel and unique components that emerge from the study, such as Technology, Infrastructure, Energy, Pandemic Resiliency, Legal, Demography and Propagation substantiate the dynamic nature of the holistic perspective. We recommend that for accurate and better holistic evaluation of smart cities, evaluation schemes need to assimilate varied smart city components from the 3 main categories in a balanced manner. This adds value to the holistic approach and allows diversity and context specificity to thrive in smart city components making them holistic in the true sense. The study is beneficial for policymakers and researchers for holistic measurement of smart city performance.