The Idea of a Smart City in the Development Strategies of Polish Voivodeship Cities – a Gap or a Potential?

Purpose: The concept of smart city has entered into discussion on urban development.
Its applications in large and smaller cities are widely discussed in scientific publications,
but on how to link the smart city concept with strategic documents – not so largely. The aim of
the article is to verify the literature gap, as well as the degree of consideration of the concept of
smart city in regional cities.
Design/methodology/approach: Bibliometric analysis of publications combining smart city
themes and strategies available in the Scopus database served to answer the question whether
the scientific literature corresponds to the current scale of application activities of the smart city
idea. Polish voivodeship cities strategic documents’ analysis was focused on the main
dimensions of the smart city concept they hold, used NLP (Natural Language Processing)
methods.
Findings: The literature on the implementation of the concept of smart cities in city strategies
focuses on individual aspects of this concept – multidimensional in its essence.
More comprehensive research is needed on balancing the goals and perspectives of city
stakeholders. Strategies of cities analyzed for the implementation of smart solutions turn out to
be fragmented – they focus on (from the most popular) smart economies, life, mobility,
environment, governance to smart people. In addition, these strategies are mainly postulative,
and the goal of cities is to obtain the status of a smart city rather than support it (only Lublin
and Krakow declare this).
Research limitations/implications: Strategic documents alone are too alike to let conclude
about the implementation of the smart idea in individual cities. They should be completed with
qualitative data. The NLP tools applied, although they provide interesting results, need to be
tuned on a larger set of texts than accessible.
Practical implications: Voivodeship cities shape strategies that are too similar to actually
compete with each other. Thematic modelling of city-specific documents can unhide context
that have not yet been recognized while reflecting their potential to stand out.
Originality/value: The results of topic modelling can reveal latent themes related to the city
they manage to city authorities. The gap in theory needs completion by research on the
relationship between the smart city concept and urban strategies.
Keywords: smart city, city strategy, thematic modelling, CLARIN.