A novel taxonomy of smart sustainable city indicators

Building a smart city that follows sustainability goals enhances the quality of life and preserves environmental, human, and social capital. Yet, existing smart sustainable city projects have concentrated on the technological dimensions of smart cities such as using big data or smart devices to follow sustainability goals. Currently, there is no comprehensive category of smart sustainable city indicators in the literature. This paper aims to discover these indicators by considering the common features of sustainability and smart city concepts. Two rounds of the content analysis technique were employed to investigate semantic, lexical, and conceptual relationships between smart city and sustainability indicators. This paper employed the Sustainable Development Indicators suggested by OECD and the Smart City Index Master by Cohen as the two main groups of indicators. The findings offer a novel set of indicators that enables policymakers and researchers to consider the smartness and sustainability of their projects simultaneously. This includes socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and governance categories with 28 associated indicators. The outcome of this paper offers a unique combined category of smart sustainable city indicators by considering the key elements of sustainability and smart city concepts. Academics and policymakers can also employ this set of indicators as a guideline to build a smart sustainable community.