Smart Sustainable Cities: Bibliometric Study and Patent Information

Cities that reinvent themselves must pay attention to social inclusion and green technologies, combined with smart management of the territory for sustainable urban development of new territories. This article aims to identify the concepts of Smart Sustainable Cities, according to the approach of the main referenced authors, besides identifying the production of patents related to the object of study. To do so, a bibliometric survey and patent data mining was carried out in September 2016. Data for the bibliometric study was collected in the databases Web of Science and Scopus and later on, processed through Bibexcel software. Crawler Patent2Net was used for the data mining of patents. After the research, it was concluded that the concepts of Smart Cities and Sustainable Cities converged over time. Smart Cities should be sustainable and offer quality of life and Sustainable Cities should use information and communication technologies to monitor the flow of resources. However, there are authors who say that these concepts are different. There is a theoretical gap about the concept and specific characteristics of Smart Sustainable Cities. The patent deposit on smart cities has been increasing since 2010. About 55.11% of the patents obtained in the survey of smart city were on wireless communication networks.