Smart Villages: A review of the state of the art

Over the last two decades, communities have faced many challenges. Together with environmental concerns, above all the climate change phenomenon, and the economic recession, since the beginning of the 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic crisis is threatening both urban and rural societies. There is an ongoing debate among policy makers, scholars and economic operators on how to cope with these pressures and technological innovation/ICT is often seen as a mean for helping local communities by making “smarter” societies. If, on the one hand, the notion of “smartness” has fuelled the debate when referring to urban areas, and has led to a recognized definition of smart city, on the other hand there is not a universally accepted paradigm for translating it into rural areas, yet. The “Smart Villages” concept, in fact, is quite new; in the European Union, the Smart Village Initiative was launched by the European Parliament in 2017, and, in the same year, the EU Action for Smart Villages document was published by the European Commission together with the European Parliament. This was the starting point in Europe in order to define the conceptual framework for speculating on how to apply smart solutions in rural areas at different levels, from the general policies to the operational applications. This contribution aims at providing a state of the art of the literature review inherent to the topic. For reaching this goal, a bibliometric study has been carried out by questioning the two main scientific databases, i.e. Scopus and Web of Science, using “smart village” as a keyword (20th January 2021). 316 papers containing the wording “smart village” in the title and/or keywords and/or abstract have been detected. After checking the results for avoiding overlapping, a total of 219 has been selected to be examined. 87% of the total was published from 2017 onwards; with 55 publications moreover, 2020 represents the year with the highest number of manuscripts related to the topic, showing and increasing interest in the issue. Furthermore, as regards the type of publication, the survey lists 104 articles, 33 book chapters and 82 conference papers. This study will contribute on the accelerating progress towards SDG’s in times of crisis by providing an in-depth overview of this topic for defining potential research gaps as well as possible avenues of research, and it has to be seen particularly related to the “SDG 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”, targets 11.a and 11.b.