Smart City Projects Evaluation: A Bibliometric Approach

Abstract

Smart cities constitute complex ecosystems and urban fabrics, both physical and intangible, which are very promising in terms of improving, among other factors, sustainability, urban liveability, and citizens’ workability. Now, more than ever, smart cities attract considerable attention from both academics and practitioners. This growing interest often focuses on the evaluation of smart city’s development and deployment projects by specifically assessing if these projects successfully contribute to the “intelligence” of a city. The current chapter attempts to further contribute to this research direction. In particular, the chapter accelerates a city’s competencies by emphasizing a smart city projects evaluation framework that emerges from a bibliometric analysis focusing on the plethora of parameters that are set in relevant bibliographic sources with the aim to evaluate the success or not of a smart city. The performed bibliographic analysis highlighted, in terms of evaluating the success of smart city projects, the increased appearance of technical parameters and less interest in social or citizen-centric factors. The results of this study map the major bibliographic trends on the subject of smart cities or projects evaluation or success and, then, highlight the gap of the citizen-based approach in the evaluation of smart cities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.