https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0865-3404
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ABSTRACT
Following up on a two decades-long debate on Smart Cities, this article provides quantitative evidence regarding the impact on urban economic outcomes of the adoption of Smart City strategies in planning and managing modern cities. In order to achieve this aim, a meta-analysis of quantitative and modeling studies is presented as a systematic synthesis tool, based on a keyword search on Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus data bases. Our meta-analytical modeling results demonstrate significant geographical heterogeneity in the assessed impacts, and suggest that a relevant role is played by whether urban smartness is interpreted and pursued in a holistic or digital-only orientation. Suggestions for further research are provided as well.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Richard Hanley, and two anonymous reviewers for comments that led to an improvement of the article’s logic. All remaining errors are our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This is a dichotomous classification that may miss some important nuances that the growing body of research on Smart Cities is encompassing. For instance, Mora et al. (Citation2019a) apply a bibliometric analysis to two decades of Smart City research to identify four major dichotomies: techno-led or holistic, top-down or bottom-up, double or triple/quadruple helix, and mono-dimensional or integrated. Mora et al. (Citation2019b) then applies this classification in reading empirical case studies of applications of the Smart City paradigm in the EU.
2 The literature has also presented systematic overviews – see e.g., Tomor et al. (Citation2019) for a focus on smart governance, and Joss et al. (Citation2019) for a webometric exercise involving hit counts produced by searching for “smart city.”
3 The literature on Smart Cities has been increasingly focusing, among the many research directions in this field, on reading Smart Cities as factors for public value creation or as drivers of sustainable urban development. However, for the sake of our empirical work, conceptual advances in the interpretation of Smart Cities are typically not matched by quantitative assessments that may enter the sample we analyze.
4 Details on the meta-analysis are discussed in the Section “Meta-Analysis Design.”
5 The focus of this meta-analysis does not aim at demoting any non-economic impact that the adoption of the Smart City paradigm may have. The literature has in fact dealt with many non-economic outcomes due to the adoption of the Smart City planning approach. These include the perceived importance of economic development among local policymakers (Abutabenjeh et al., Citation2022); energy consumption (Khansari et al., Citation2014); and citizens’ satisfaction (Xu and Zhu, Citation2021), among many.
6 Gray literature publications are “non-conventional, fugitive, and sometimes ephemeral publications. They may include, but are not limited to the following types of materials: reports (pre-prints, preliminary progress and advanced reports, technical reports, statistical reports, memoranda, state-of-the art reports, market research reports, etc.), theses, conference proceedings, technical specifications and standards, non-commercial translations, bibliographies, technical and commercial documentation, and official documents not published commercially (primarily government reports and documents)” (Grey Literature, Citation2021).
7 The choice of Google Scholar as the starting point for our analysis was motivated by the desire to include a wide range of publication outlets (Gusenbauer, Citation2019), accounting for the variety that characterizes the literature on Smart Cities. We have then verified, after selecting the contributions according to our aim, i.e., those focusing on quantitative analysis of the impact of the Smart City paradigm, if they were also indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, or not.
8 It is worth stressing that we have not focused only on publications citing Caragliu et al. (Citation2011), but only used a selected time frame, focusing on works on Smart Cities published after 2011.
9 A couple of papers were added manually, by using a snowballing technique, searching for papers citing those in our database and checking the publications of renowned scholars in the field.
10 For reasons of space limitations, a breakdown of the main classes featured on the right hand side variables is provided in Table A.1 in the Technical Appendix.
11 Some studies included in our analysis explicitly account for a mix of features making cities more attractive, mostly for touristic purposes. While this may be including amenities, it also encompasses factors such as the efficiency of the public administration. The fear that this factor may partially overlap with the notion of amenities is supported by the fact that a Pearson’s correlation index of the two variables is equal to 0.89, significant at all conventional levels. Moreover, a model including both variables (such as the preferred specification in , Column 8) is associated with upsetting levels of the Variance Inflation Factor (for both variables, around 7). For this reason, the preferred specification only maintains “attractiveness.”
12 This guess seems to be rejected by looking at WoS publications identified with the search strategy “Smart Cit*.” The peak appears to have been reached in 2019 with a total of 8,282 records.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrea Caragliu
Andrea Caragliu is an associate professor of regional and urban economics at Politecnico di Milano where he is the deputy director of the Master of Science Degree in Management of Built Environment and the deputy director of the PhD program in Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering.
Chiara F. Del Bo
Chiara F. Del Bo is an associate professor of Public Economics at Università degli Studi di Milano. and she is the associate editor of the Cambridge Elements of Public Economics.
Peter Nijkamp
Peter Nijkamp is emeritus professor in regional and urban economics and in economic geography at the VU University, and is associated with The Open University of the Netherlands (OU), Heerlen (The Netherlands), the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Iasi (Romania), and the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing.