Are smart cities more sustainable? An exploratory study of 103 U.S. cities

Cities play a vital role in tackling sustainability challenges. Smart cities have emerged as solutions to urban sustainability. However, whether smart city practices lead to environmental, economic, and social sustainability outcomes is still not clear. This is due to a lack of thorough knowledge of how local governments have deployed the smart city notion, as well as a lack of holistic evaluation of sustainability outcomes achieved by smart cities. To fill in this gap, this research evaluates whether local implementation of smart cities is associated with sustainability outcomes at the city level. We studied 103 US cities by integrating a sustainability assessment conducted by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and text mining of city official websites. Our analysis shows that more than 80% of the 103 cities have smart city statements on their websites. In addition, smart cities generally score higher on sustainability outcomes than non-smart cities. Furthermore, when controlling for population size and geographic region, smart city mentions are positively associated with economic sustainability outcomes. However, the relationship between smart city mentions and environmental and social sustainability is not statistically significant. This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the prevalence of local governments’ deployment of smart cities, which is scarce at present, and gives novel insight into the relationship between the use of technologies and urban sustainability.