Research Trends on Smart Cities Evolution Towards Sustainable Urban Planning: A Bibliometric Study Over the Past Half Decade

Owing to the significance of sustainable urban panning the concept of smart cities is relevant for diverse stakeholders. A smart city employs state-of-the-art technologies, data-driven analysis, and networking to enhance efficiency, sustainability, and the quality of life for its residents. This approach promotes creativity and facilitates efficient urban planning. This paper reflects on analytical review of literature on the concept of smart city sustainable urban planning. The methodology includes use of bibliometric review for the period ranging from 2019 to 2024. The present time span is chosen by the researcher as before 2019 the research on the area had a rising trend majorly on the technology-based concept of smart cities but the sustainability agendas surged the market 2019 onwards. For the review, 833 documents have been retrieved from the Scopus database in the specific research field by using the keywords "Smart Cities", "Urban Planning", and "Sustainable". To analyse the global perspective, the data on publication, most relevant sources, authors, countries, keyword co-occurrence, global citation has been assessed using VOS viewer and R-studio [Biblioshiny] software. The paper examines the volume of research carried out on the area of smart cities, sustainable urban planning, and development. The study's findings indicate that the highest level of output was observed in 2021, followed by 2020 and 2023. Furthermore, there is a projected upward trend in production starting from 2023. The Q1 journals have the highest amount of articles. Australia and the Netherlands are the most active countries globally in this field. Therefore, this study will assist academics in comprehending the dynamics of publications about smart city concerns for urban development and sustainable planning. Identifying emerging patterns and proposing future study directions for evaluating innovative approaches to building and governing sustainable smart cities.