Table 1 Reviewed literature

1

Yigitcanlar, T., & Lee, S. H. (2014). Korean ubiquitous-eco-city: A smart-sustainable urban form or a branding hoax?. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 89, 100–114.

The paper aims to put the premise of u-eco-city into a test and address whether u-eco-city is a dazzling smart and sustainable urban form that constitutes an ideal twenty-first century city model or just a branding hoax.

2

Kramers, A., Höjer, M., Lövehagen, N., & Wangel, J. (2014). Smart sustainable cities–Exploring ICT solutions for reduced energy use in cities. Environmental Modelling & Software, 56, 52–62.

This paper explores the opportunities of using ICT as an enabling technology to reduce energy use in our cities.

3

Götz, G., & Schäffler, A. (2015). Conundrums in implementing a green economy in the Gauteng City-Region. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 13, 79–87.

This paper analyses how these green economy strategies have faced conundrums that narrow the thinking on future growth paths, in turn threatening to reproduce a profoundly unsustainable regional economy.

4

Lazaroiu, G. C., & Roscia, M. (2012). Definition methodology for the smart cities model. Energy, 47(1), 326–332.

This paper proposes a model for computing the smart city indices. However, the chosen indicators are not homogeneous, and contain high amount of information.

5

Lee, J. H., Hancock, M. G., & Hu, M. C. (2014). Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: Lessons from Seoul and San Francisco. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 89, 80–99.

This paper develops a conceptual framework to examine and analyse two leading cases from the US and Asia. Through the lens of this new framework the paper identifies heterogeneous and heterogeneous characteristics in the process of planning and developing a smart city.

6

Marsal-Llacuna, M. L., Colomer-Llinàs, J., & Meléndez-Frigola, J. (2015). Lessons in urban monitoring taken from sustainable and livable cities to better address the Smart Cities initiative. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 90, 611–622.

This paper puts forward new ideas for monitoring the smart cities initiative in a better way.

7

Joss, S. (2015). Eco-cities and Sustainable Urbanism. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 829–837.

This paper focuses on the eco-city and related concepts and the practices of sustainable urbanism that have since the early 2000s gained growing international popularity and entered mainstream policy as a consequence of the forceful combination of global climate change concerns and a rapidly urbanizing world population.

8

Bayulken, B., & Huisingh, D. (2015). Are lessons from eco-towns helping planners make more effective progress in transforming cities into sustainable urban systems: a literature review (part 2 of 2). Journal of Cleaner Production, 109, 152–165.

This paper summarises and systematises the insights that have been obtained from eco-town based urban developments implemented in the North-western Europe with particular emphasis given into the examples from the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.

9

Hu, M. C., Wu, C. Y., & Shih, T. (2015). Creating a new socio-technical regime in China: Evidence from the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City. Futures, 70, 1–12.

This paper reveals that an expansion of the scale of urbanisation and its transformation into the focal point of the hub-and-spoke eco-city model will enable China to advance as an international pioneer, by the creation of a new socio-technical regime dependent on green and ecologically sustainable systems.

10

Marsal-Llacuna, M. L., & Segal, M. E. (2016). The Intelligenter Method (I) for making “smarter” city projects and plans. Cities, 55, 127–138.

This paper proposes a first-of-its-kind method for the design of truly smart city projects and the elaboration of smarter urban planning. The Intelligenter Method is based on the innovative idea of collaborations discovery in urban systems.

11

Jong, M., Joss, S., Schraven, D., Zhan, C., & Weijnen, M. (2015). Sustainable–smart–resilient–low carbon–eco–knowledge cities; making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization. Journal of Cleaner Production, 109, 25–38.

This paper aims to investigate, through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis, the 12 most common city categories/typologies.

12

Ahvenniemi, H., Huovila, A., Pinto-Seppä, I., & Airaksinen, M. (2017). What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities?. Cities, 60, 234–245.

The paper analyses 16 sets of city assessment frameworks (eight smart city and eight urban sustainability assessment frameworks) comprising 958 indicators altogether by dividing the indicators under three impact categories and 12 sectors.

13

Zhou, N., He, G., Williams, C., & Fridley, D. (2015). Elite cities: a low-carbon eco-city evaluation tool for China. Ecological Indicators, 48, 448–456.

This paper through its Elite cities framework measures progress on 33 key indicators selected to represent priority issues within eight primary categories. An excel-based tool was developed to package the key indicators, indicator benchmarks, explanation of indicators, point calculation functions and transparency-oriented data recording instructions.

14

Tsolakis, N., & Anthopoulos, L. (2015). Eco-cities: An integrated system dynamics framework and a concise research taxonomy. Sustainable Cities and Society, 17, 1–14.

This paper addresses the problem of the eco-city paradigm assessment with a multi-method approach. It grounds three research questions with focus to eco-cities and applies alternative methodologies in an attempt to answer them.

15

Dhingra, M., & Chattopadhyay, S. (2016). Advancing smartness of traditional settlements-case analysis of Indian and Arab old cities. International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment, 5(2), 549–563.

The paper aims to investigate the concept of smart sustainable cities in traditionally planned and organically grown settlements. Smart Cities Mission is an ambitious project of Government of India targeting 100 cities for improving their urban quality of life.

16

Fu, Y., & Zhang, X. (2017). Trajectory of urban sustainability concepts: A 35-year bibliometric analysis. Cities, 60, 113–123.

This paper conducts a descriptive summary, a clustering analysis, and multidimensional scaling of major city concepts, by establishing a co-word matrix of high-frequency keywords occurring in the Science Citations Index and Social Science Citations Index databases.

17

Angelidou, M. (2015). Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces. Cities, 47, 95–106.

This paper aims to identify the forces shaping the smart city conception and, by doing so, begins replacing the currently abstract image of what it means to be a smart city.

18

Yigitcanlar, T., (2015). Smart cities: an effective urban development and management model? Australian Planner, 52(1), 27–34.

This paper aims to firstly, investigate the role of smart urban technologies in the progress of smart city formation, and thus providing conceptual clarity on smart cities, and; secondly, undertake a critical review of application attempts of the smart city model by looking into emerging practices of ubiquitous eco-cities as exemplar smart city initiatives from Korea.

19

Lara, A., Costa, E., Furlani, T., & Yigitcanlar, T., (2016). Smartness that matters: comprehensive and human-centred characterisation of smart cities. Journal of Open Innovation, 2(8), 1–13

This paper aims to undertake a comprehensive review of how smart cities are perceived in the literature and in the light of the findings propose a clearer definition with strong smart community focus.

20

Cohen, B., & Amorós, J. E. (2014). Municipal demand-side policy tools and the strategic management of technology life cycles. Technovation, 34(12), 797–806.

This paper develops a conceptual framework that helps to understand how local governments might develop demand-side policy tools that stimulate the development and diffusion of sustainable-driven innovations that enhance local economic development.

21

Edvardsson, I., Yigitcanlar, T., & Pancholi, S., (2016). Knowledge cities research and practice under the microscope: a review of the literature. Knowledge Management Research and Practice, 14(4), 537–564.

This paper aims to scrutinise and provide a clear understanding on the evolution of knowledge city research and practice

22

Tan, S., Yang, J., Yan, J., Lee, C., Hashim, H., & Chen, B. (2017). A holistic low carbon city indicator framework for sustainable development. Applied Energy, 185, 1919–1930.

This paper develops an indicator framework for the evaluation of low-carbon city from the perspectives of economic, energy pattern, social and living, carbon and environment, urban mobility, solid waste, and water.

23

Neirotti, P., De Marco, A., Cagliano, A. C., Mangano, G., & Scorrano, F. (2014). Current trends in Smart City initiatives: Some stylised facts. Cities, 38, 25–36.

This paper provides policy makers and city managers with useful guidelines to define and drive their smart city strategy and planning actions towards the most appropriate domains of implementation.

24

Andrade, J. B. S. O., Ribeiro, J. M. P., Fernandez, F., Bailey, C., Barbosa, S. B., & da Silva Neiva, S. (2016). The adoption of strategies for sustainable cities: A comparative study between Newcastle and Florianópolis focused on urban mobility. Journal of Cleaner Production, 113, 681–694.

This paper aims to analyse the differences between public transportation in Newcastle upon Tyne, the city considered the most sustainable in the UK, and Florianopolis, a city with great potential for sustainable policies located in Southern Brazil.

25

Hu, M. C., Wadin, J. L., Lo, H. C., & Huang, J. Y. (2016). Transformation toward an eco-city: lessons from three Asian cities. Journal of Cleaner Production, 123, 77–87.

This paper elucidates the effects of different national approaches to eco-city development and their antecedents of the build comparing three Asian cities.