The Role of Smart City in Achieving Sustainable Development: Google Trends Analysis and Exponential Time Series Smoothing Models

Abstract

The concept of sustainable smart urban development is an important element of the modern discourse on the future development of cities, regions, and the world as a whole, a key component of a strategy aimed at introducing innovations, improving the life quality of citizens, ensuring inclusiveness and sustainability of local development. It integrates the concept of Smart City as the application of advanced innovative technologies to solve urban problems and the concept of Sustainable Development as a balancing of socio-economic and environmental interests to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. While discussing the problems and prospects introducing any social models or strategies, it is important to understand the level of public interest in this issue, the level of citizens’ awareness, the readiness to receive new information, and the readiness for change. The article is focused on the analysis of retrospective dynamics (from 01.01.2010 to 01.12.2023) and economic and mathematical modelling of forecast trends in changing public interest in the concepts of “Smart City” and “Sustainable Development” (identified using the Google Trends tool). The analysis was carried out for the world as a whole and for Ukraine specifically. The study identifies and describes the evolution of changes in public interest in these topics, identifies the time points of a sharp surge in interest, and conducts a comparative analysis in the content (trends for these two search queries) and spatial context (trends in Ukraine compared to global trends). The countries of the world and regions of Ukraine where user interest in the relevant topics dominates are ranked, and the countries of the world and regions of Ukraine where user interest in the relevant topics dominates are ranked, the TOP-10 are identified. The factors whose influence is relevant to the public interest dynamics are identified (consumer trends, media activity, dynamics of the introduction of relevant concepts, cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts, the general level of education, digital inclusion and consciousness of the population of different countries, etc.) Using the exponential smoothing method, models were built to predict the dynamics of time series – the number of queries from Ukrainian Internet users regarding the concepts of “Smart City” and “Sustainable Development”. Additive forecasting models, which differ in the trend component, are obtained.