Perception of smart sustainable cities: a conceptual framework development using group concept mapping method

A bottom-up approach was adopted to conceptualise a smart sustainable city through the perspective of stakeholders living in Sunway City Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, touted as a smart sustainable city. The group concept mapping method allows the collection of the city stakeholder views and translation of these views into a framework through five steps: create statements, sort statements, multidimensional scaling, hierarchical cluster analysis and label clusters. This process generated 80 statements that compose a smart sustainable city, creating a conceptual framework of eight dimensions: green environment, township planning, community-friendly township, utilities management, waste management, smart transportation, digitalisation and technology. A validation stage using a confirmatory composite analysis with a reduced statement list of 40 items and 297 participants was also conducted. These results demonstrated that the stakeholders prioritised non-technical features, such as clean air, clean water and community activities over the need to adopt digital features. New features such as urban agriculture, co-living and others were rated less important, implying that new concepts may require strong community participation and support for implementation from the city authorities. The main contribution of this study is the bottom-up approach using group concept mapping, contrary to the traditional top-down approach, offering a novel method for the conceptualising process.