Digital City towards Smart City: a theoretical overview

In recent years urban and metropolitan contexts are labelled in several ways that sometimes overlap one another. When scanning literature it is possible to observe that the most relevant labels are ‘digital city’ and ‘smart city’, especially as it regards the different governance of these contexts and the management of territories, resources, and service; these two topics are frequently considered as connected by some authors, as they state ‘smart city’ is an evolution of ‘digital city’. The aim of this work is to depict the usage of both terms among the scholars and the connections among the different scientific fields. In order to achieve this goal we perform a bibliometric analysis based on literature contributions in a time span from 2000 to 2014. The results show that ‘digital city’ emerged before ‘smart city’ and representing part of its development from different scientific fields and thanks to the contributions of several authors. In addition, it is possible to observe that 'digital city' is still today the most cited issue keeping its own relevance in spite of the development of ‘smart city’, that today is one of the hottest topic in the domain.