Yiyi Su, Di Fan
Regional Studies
Recommend Reason
As is becoming the 21st-century urban norm, the shift towards the smart–sustainable city has attracted great debate among multilateral bodies (e.g., urban developers, administrators and academia). The new smart urbanization confounds means and ends, with the underlying causal complexity not well-articulated. This study adopts a configurational approach to address the fundamental theoretical question: How are smart city elements configured to achieve or hinder urban sustainability? It makes three theoretical contributions. First, it incorporates an input–output analysis in recent sustainability research. Second, it elucidates the conjunctive, equifinal and asymmetric features of smart city elements in a detailed and delicate way. Third, it finds the presence of smart supporting for high human development and the lack of it for the negation outcome (all as core conditions), which echoes the recent paradigm change in both academic and policy arenas.
About the Author
Yiyi Su, School of Economics and Management, Tongji University
Di Fan, School of Management, RMIT University
Keywords
smart city elements; ecological performance; human development; urban sustainability; configurational theorizing; fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)
Brief Introduction
The last two decades have witnessed a surge in interest in the smart–sustainable city, but it remains unclear how smart cities can achieve the multifaceted goals of sustainable development, such as ecological performance, human development and sustainability efficiency. This study performs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 35 Chinese large smart cities through configurational theorizing of the smart–sustainable city nexus. The findings not only reveal the causal complexity of constructing smart cities to achieve urban sustainability, but also develop a taxonomy of smart city configurations leading to ecological performance or human development, namely, duplexcentric, eco-centric, human-centric and double-bind modes.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2022.2106360
