Illuminating Smart City Solutions – A Taxonomy and Clusters.

With urban problems intensifying, Smart City solutions are recognized by researchers and practitioners as one of the most promising solutions to make urban areas economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. While many elements of Smart City solutions have been explored, existing works either treat Smart City solutions as technical black boxes or focus exclusively on Smart City solutions’ technical or nontechnical characteristics. Therefore, to conceptualize the unique characteristics of Smart City solutions currently available, we developed a multi-layer taxonomy based on Smart City solution literature and a sample of 106 Smart City solutions. Moreover, we identified three clusters, each covering a typical combination of characteristics of Smart City solutions. We evaluated our findings by applying the Q-sort method. The results contribute to the descriptive knowledge of Smart City solutions as a first step for a theory for analyzing and enable researchers and practitioners to understand Smart City solutions more holistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]