Assessment of Tendency to Become a Smart City Among Turkish Cities in the Context of Underdevelopment: An Empirical Analysis

More than half of the world's population lives in cities, which creates serious pressure on cities. Eliminating this pressure is important for the sustainability of cities, as well as for improving the quality of urban life. In this context, the smart city model has recently been utilised to address urban sustainability challenges and enhance the quality of urban life. The model has a framework aimed at overcoming the mentioned issues through the use of technology. This model has begun to be included in upper-scale policy documents all around the world, along with Turkey. However, the human and physical entities that make up the components of the smart city differ spatially within the country, which points to the problem that the smart city model cannot be equally effective everywhere. Therefore, this study aims to demonstrate the trend of NUTS 3 regions in Turkey to become smart cities based on variables considered the most important components of a smart city, such as technological infrastructure, human capital, and governance structure. In order to achieve this goal, cluster analysis was applied to these variables. The analysis has revealed that there are five different clusters in Turkey that differ from each other in terms of the tendency to become smart cities. The findings indicate that smart city applications cannot be used equally effectively and efficiently in each region in parallel with the differentiation of the level of development.