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The impact of digital technologies and social media on the urban attractiveness of smart cities

2025· article· en· W4415517354 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueTechnological Forecasting and Social Change · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicSmart Cities and Technologies
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSocial mediaAttractivenessSmart cityDigital mediaValue (mathematics)Work (physics)Emerging technologiesInformation technology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Smart city initiatives use digital technologies to enhance user experiences and improve the attractiveness of urban environments. However, little is known about how these technologies influence a city's ability to attract different types of newcomers, and even less about the role of social media in this process. This work examines how a city's use of social media influences the relationship between the effect of digital technology implementation and the urban attractiveness for national and international newcomers. Focusing on three types of national and international newcomers (i.e., citizens, students, and tourists) to a city, we present and test a model of how social media curates, broadcasts, and accelerates information flows about the availability and value of smart city technology to newcomers. Using novel data from 30 Italian cities (2010−2021), we find support for this model, with digital technologies having a curvilinear impact on urban attractiveness, and that social media extends the threshold of this impact. Moreover, we find that these effects differ for national and international newcomers. These findings challenge smart city scholars and practitioners to reconsider the ‘more is better’ narrative that assumes increasing technology implementation is always beneficial, highlighting instead the value of contingency-based approaches over one-size-fits-all technological determinism. • Digital technology implementation shows a curvilinear relationship with urban attractiveness, indicating that benefits are not unlimited. • Social media use by cities extends the tipping point of digital technology's positive effects, but this advantage is mainly for national newcomers. • Findings challenge the “more-is-better” assumption in smart city research, highlighting the value of differentiated, user-centric digital strategies. • The asymmetric effects between national and international newcomers underscore the need for tailored policy design and targeted investment priorities.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.533
Threshold uncertainty score0.648

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.183 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it