Smart cities and sustainable development

The last two decades have witnessed a surge in interest in the smart-sustainable city, but it remains unclear how smart cities can achieve the multifaceted goals of sustainable development, such as ecological performance, human development and sustainability efficiency. This study performs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 35 Chinese large smart cities through configurational theorizing of the smart-sustainable city nexus. The findings not only reveal the causal complexity of constructing smart cities to achieve urban sustainability, but also develop a taxonomy of smart city configurations leading to ecological performance or human development, namely, duplex-centric, eco-centric, human-centric and double-bind modes.