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Smart cities show a “booming” trend both in the academia and the industry in recent years. Scholars across the world have been investigating how new technologies are applied to develop new services to the inhabitants and cities all over the world also address the “smart cities” challenges by promoting policymaking and governance. This paper aims to conduct in-depth research on smart cities by combining the study of governance policy study and information technology study.

This paper empirically mapped the trends of smart city development, outstanding scholars and hot topics about smart cities by analyzing important references using CiteSpace. The authors visualized references and topics to analyze smart city research, based on empirical data from Web of Science. Furthermore, two most important research branches – topics from smart city governance research and those from information systems (IS) research were studied, respectively.

First, the authors mapped the development of research and divided the development into three different stages. Second, the authors explored important, influential and instructive publications and publications’ attributes including authors, institutions, journals and topics. Third, the authors found there are different characteristics between the IS group and the governance group in publication situations, influential institutions, journals and authors, although the research points of the two branches are overlapping and fragmented. Finally, the authors proposed important topics, which include “internet of things (IoT)”, “big data”, “smart city systems” and “smart city management” and the authors predicted that “IoT” and “smart city challenge” would be future trends in recent years.

This study is an innovative research of its category because it visualized the development of smart city research, analyzed both governance and technology branches of smart city research synthetically using CiteSpace and forecasted future trends of smart city research by topics analysis and visualization of evolution.

This study explores the best strategies for regional economic development to attract highly skilled populations, regardless of whether the region is a multisector or unisector economic hub. It also determines the development variables affecting the success of integrated regional economic hubs to achieve spatial equality, enhance economic productivity and attain environmental sustainability.

In addition to a qualitative analysis, this study employed quantitative techniques using SPSS software. This allowed amplification of the most significant explanatory variables affecting the weaknesses and strengths of economic hubs.

The results highlight approaches that can be used to achieve socio-economic sustainability in regional hubs. These include multisectors or main centralised hubs (smart economic regional capital), which provide new services to regions and act as a unidevelopment sector or as a regional, economic capital.

The study analyses the effect of economic strategies and integration of natural resources and the required core services in regional economic development.

Case studies of successful economic hubs are discussed. The most important services proposed in such hubs promote human development and increase the standard of living.

Integration between the hubs in a region is fundamental to attracting direct investments that can benefit the local population.

The results could help governments, economists and planners implement multisector developmental hubs to achieve sustainable development.