Smart cities and sustainable development

The last two decades have witnessed a surge in interest in the smart–sustainable city, but it remains unclear how smart cities can achieve the multifaceted goals of sustainable development, such as ecological performance, human development and sustainability efficiency. This study performs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 35 Chinese large smart cities through configurational theorizing of the smart–sustainable city nexus. The findings not only reveal the causal complexity of constructing smart cities to achieve urban sustainability, but also develop a taxonomy of smart city configurations leading to ecological performance or human development, namely, duplex-centric, eco-centric, human-centric and double-bind modes.