Making a city "smart" is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Yet little academic research has sparingly discussed the phenomenon. To close the gap in the literature about smart cities and in response to the increasing use of the concept, this paper proposes a framework to understand the concept of smart cities. Based on the exploration of a wide and extensive array of literature from various disciplinary areas we identify eight critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy context, people and communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors form the basis of an integrative framework that can be used to examine how local governments are envisioning smart city initiatives. The framework suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals.

Information and information technologies have become ubiquitous in the public sector and it is difficult to think of a public problem or government service that does not involve them in some substantial way. Public management (PM) research now incorporates the effects of the availability and quality of data as well as the technologies used in the public sector. From a PM perspective, digital government (DG) could be considered an essential aspect of innovation, co-production, transparency, and the generation of public value. However, studies that attempt to understand the role that DG research plays in PM theory and practice are scarce. As a research field, DG emerged from multiple disciplines, including public administration, information science, management information systems, computer science, communication, and political science. There have been numerous efforts in the last decade to delineate this emergent academic community by assessing the growing body of research represented by hundreds of new peer-reviewed publications every year. This paper reviews these prior studies about the DG community, along with a systematic review of recent articles in top public administration journals from the United States and Europe, to begin to identify and compare key characteristics of these academic communities, including their core researchers, theories, topics, and methods. We argue that their similarities and differences present opportunities for more dialogue between DG and PM scholars that could produce synergies to enhance the production and dissemination of knowledge, yielding greater influence on practice.

This study represents two critical steps forward in the area of smart city research and practice. The first is in the form of the development of a comprehensive conceptualization of smart city as a resource for researchers and government practitioner