Have European ‘smart city’ initiatives improved the quality of their citizens’ lives: searching for the evidence

Abstract

Over the last decade, the EU has promoted the use of Smart City initiatives (SCIs) as means of - amongst other goals - improving citizens’ quality of life (QoL). This paper examines whether literature in the public domain, reporting such initiatives in Europe, contains empirical evidence validating the causal relationship posited between SCIs and QoL. The main question explored is: Is there evidence in the public domain that European ‘smart city’ initiatives have improved the quality of their citizens’ lives? A broadly based literature review was undertaken to discover whether those chronicling such initiatives report success – in terms of achieving the objectives/benefits they set themselves. Key literature selected from the Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar was critically examined to establish what current, public domain evidence suggests about the ability of SC initiatives to improve the quality of citizens’ lives. This review yielded 35 non-duplicated publications related to ‘quality of life’ as a goal of smart city initiatives – as signposted by their titles. These articles were searched using five terms: objectives, benefits, outcomes, causal relationships and evidence. Seven papers, for which full texts were available, were then subjected to detailed content analyses. The findings show that published evidence dealing with this causal relationship is scant. Existing literature is strong on upfront promotion of the need for SCIs but weak on what they have delivered on the ground. Like the meaning of QoL itself in SC initiatives, the ‘benefits’ delivered on this front are not unpacked. As a result, despite their decade long history, the performance of, and outcomes from, European SC initiatives remain poorly understood. This is partly owing to the dearth of published evidence about these issues, compounded by the inadequate research designs adopted for such initiatives, especially by the insufficient attention given to reporting on their implementation or to evaluations of what they have achieved in practice. Disentanglement of empirical measurement of QoL before and after SC initiatives will be crucial for rectifying this.