Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis to Reveal Underlying Configurations of Holistic Smart Cities

The smart city is a “glocal” strategy as, resource inputs, contextual factors and local needs are closely related to smart city development. However, few studies have revealed the complex interactions and interrelationships between these factors and smart city development. Although existing literature emphasizes the importance of adopting a multi-dimensional, integrated intervention logic for smart city initiatives, no study systematically explores the paths toward this. To delve into this topic, we adopted a configurational method, the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). We examined 49 Chinese cases to identify three different development paths to multi-dimensional smart cities, including the “Technocratic path,” the “Human capital and knowledge dual-driven path,” and the “High-urbanized affluent path.” Our research results show that smart cities, whether wealthy or not, with high or low urbanization rates, have corresponding paths to achieve multi-dimensional smart cities. The findings provide insights and references for cities with different backgrounds on their path to multi-dimensional smart cities.