Understanding the Factors that Affect Smart City and Community Initiatives: Lessons from Local Governments in the United States

With urbanization, cities around the world have experienced increasingly complex issues that are difficult to solve using traditional strategies. So, many local governments have started smart city initiatives in order to address community issues, improve quality of life, achieve sustainable development, and, overall, make their cities smarter. As a multidimensional concept, smart city contains different components. In addition, to successfully implement smart city initiatives, local governments need to take multiple factors into consideration. Based on a survey of local governments in the United States, this article identifies what factors affect smart city and community initiatives. Overall, the analysis shows that the level of economic development, the existence of a smart city office, the availability of local government funding, the skill level of local government staff, adopting a collaborative approach, and citizens’ current IT skills all have a significant positive impact on the extent that a local government invests in smart city projects. In addition, city governments invest in significantly more types of smart city projects than villages.