The Role of Social Platform in the Constitution of Smart Cities: A Systematic Literature Review

The diffusion of social networks has made it possible to utilize human users as sensors to inspect the city environment and human activities. The increasing availability of data and the possibility of exploiting them with analytics has sparked an interesting discussion: how social media can provide valuable information for smart city planners? Such insights, related to economic activities, sustainable city design, environmental impacts, and responses to climate change, may contribute to the improvement in the quality of human life within a smart city? Thus, this paper aims to perform a Systematic Literature Review regarding the data collected and analyzed from social media and their use within smart cities, examining the extent to which this particular data source is considered in the current literature and how it is characterized in terms of benefits and challenges. The insights derived from the critical review of the literature point out gaps, which may inform future research and theory development in this area and support practitioners’ decision-making on the reconfiguration of smart cities.