The Performance of the Smart Cities in China—A Comparative Study by Means of Self-Organizing Maps and Social Networks Analysis

Dong Lu, Ye Tian, Vincent Y. Liu and Yi Zhang
Additional contact information
Dong Lu: School of Business, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu 610101, China
Ye Tian: School of Economics and Management, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
Vincent Y. Liu: School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau
Yi Zhang: Department of Mathematics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 6, 1-18

Abstract: Smart cities link the city services, citizens, resource and infrastructures together and form the heart of the modern society. As a “smart” ecosystem, smart cities focus on sustainable growth, efficiency, productivity and environmentally friendly development. By comparing with the European Union, North America and other countries, smart cities in China are still in the preliminary stage. This study offers a comparative analysis of ten smart cities in China on the basis of an extensive database covering two time periods: 2005–2007 and 2008–2010. The unsupervised computational neural network self-organizing map (SOM) analysis is adopted to map out the various cities based on their performance. The demonstration effect and mutual influences between these ten smart cities are also discussed by using social network analysis. Based on the smart city performance and cluster network, current problems for smart city development in China were pointed out. Future research directions for smart city research are discussed at the end this paper.

Keywords: smart cities; social network analysis; self-organizing map (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/6/7604/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/6/7604/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:7:y:2015:i:6:p:7604-7621:d:51066

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().