Smart City: Contrastive Understanding of a Multi-Faceted Concept

The smart city concept means different things to scholars in different fields, as well as non-academic public citizens. This study aims to contrast the distinct business and technology perspectives, and the evolving public interests. Using an entropy-based approach, we contrast business versus technology perspectives, and scholarly versus non-scholarly perspectives using the corresponding databases in ProQuest. We further contrast the public interests in smart city across time using tweets from Twitter. Preliminary results show that smart energy related topics such as power system, energy storage, energy consumption, renewable energy have recently been distinctively focused on by the technology perspective. Based on the Twitter data, over the past decade the public interests in smart city have pivoted from information technology to AI, robotics, and sustainable development.