Sustainability and Smart City: a focus on the main features

Nowadays, sustainability and the management of urban contexts are some of the most discussed topics in the contemporary debate. The two themes are linked one each other in the modern configuration of the city conceived as a complex system based on the involvement of new technologies, knowledge, infrastructure, and people. In this new scenario taking into account the aspects connected to the sustainability would have the aim to allow durability and efficiency to smart city projects. In order to deepen a previous research on the relationship between smart city and sustainability according to scholars, the present research observes the connections between smart city features and each of the three dimensions of sustainability thanks to a Content Analysis through Nvivo on Official Reports issued by 17 out of 30 Industry Players listed on the Navigant Research Report 2014, as they are involved in the most advanced smart city projects. In the comparison between the sustainability conceptualization and the 'characteristics' of a smart city, the emerged results depict interventions as mostly considering the aspects of sustainability related to 'smart economy'. Finally, in order to explore which of the three dimensions of sustainability - economic, environmental, social - is today more considered in smart city projects, we put in evidence the usage of these conceptualisations in the analyzed documents. Both the results led us to consider the economic domain as the most relevant one when debating about sustainability.