A novel taxonomy of smart sustainable city indicators

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Abstract

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.

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The qualitative content analysis process.

Satu Elo, Helvi Kyngäs (2008)

This paper is a description of inductive and deductive content analysis. Content analysis is a method that may be used with either qualitative or quantitative data and in an inductive or deductive way. Qualitative content analysis is commonly used in nursing studies but little has been published on the analysis process and many research books generally only provide a short description of this method. When using content analysis, the aim was to build a model to describe the phenomenon in a conceptual form. Both inductive and deductive analysis processes are represented as three main phases: preparation, organizing and reporting. The preparation phase is similar in both approaches. The concepts are derived from the data in inductive content analysis. Deductive content analysis is used when the structure of analysis is operationalized on the basis of previous knowledge. Inductive content analysis is used in cases where there are no previous studies dealing with the phenomenon or when it is fragmented. A deductive approach is useful if the general aim was to test a previous theory in a different situation or to compare categories at different time periods.