5. Conclusion
In recent years, the smart cities concept has become an important research topic and a priority policy agenda for many cities from both developed and developing country contexts (Yigitcanlar, 2017). Even smart city technologies are seen crucial for the survival of our species (Townsend, 2013). Today, many of the global cities’ administrations view smart urban technology applications and systems as potential vehicles to deal with their current and future developmental challenges whether they are economic, societal or environmental in nature. Consequently, smart cities have become a global phenomenon with over 250 smart city projects underway across 178 cities around the globe. In many instances, however, the fashionable term smart city is used for branding or marketing purposes with a lack of integrated approach covering sustainability concerns (Söderström et al., 2014; Shelton et al., 2015; Vanolo, 2015). In other words, the fashionable term ‘smart’ has started to replace ‘sustainable’ in the brand of many projects—for example, China’s Tianjin Eco-City is now also branded as Tianjin Smart City. According to Ahvenniemi et al. (2017, p.242), “the role of technologies in smart cities should be in enabling sustainable development of cities, not in the new technology as an end in itself. Ultimately, a city that is not sustainable is not really smart”. There is little empirical evidence that, despite its promise, smart cities contribute to sustainability agenda of those cities. In order to address this issue of whether smart city really leads to sustainable outcomes, the study at hand has put cities with smart city agendas from the UK under the sustainability performance assessment microscope. Based on the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that attempted to assess a causal relationship between city smartness and sustainability—by using nine waves of panel data.
