The Smart City as Global Discourse: Storylines and Critical Junctures across 27 Cities

TLDR

The smart city remains conceptually vague and practically elusive despite its widespread adoption. This study examines the smart city as a global discourse network by analyzing key texts from cities worldwide. Researchers conducted a webometric survey of 5,553 cities, selected the 27 with the highest search hit counts, collected 346 online texts from the top 20 results per city, and performed quantitative and qualitative analysis using AntConc. The analysis reveals a globalizing narrative that casts world cities as best‑practice models, links the smart city to a transformative governance agenda, identifies five critical junctures that expose boundary work and unresolved tensions, and offers implications for research, policy, and practice.

Abstract

Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for "smart city." Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, first, the presence of a strong globalizing narrative which emphasizes world cities as "best practice" models. Second, they reveal the smart city's association—beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes—with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy, and practice.