The European Concept of Smart City: A Taxonomic Analysis

The concept of “Smart City” became widely debated, including different components for building a truly sustainable urban environment. In the literature, there is a huge number of contributions inherent to the definition of a smart city, however, a broad view of the field is still missing. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to provide a repeatable and scalable methodology that can be applied to unstructured documents on smart cities projects considering all the multi-facet aspects of a smart city (e.g., business model, technology). Secondly, to propose an analysis carried out with a taxonomy to a database of 25 outstanding smart city projects in Europe, to discuss the current direction in which they are moving, identifying success factors and analyzing new trends and future paths.