Quantum Technologies for Smart Cities : A Comprehensive Review and Analysis

Although carrying substantial technological potential and managerial relevance for smart cities of the near future, they are still rarely investigated in smart city literature and as a breakthrough urban business model. Moreover, only a few scholarly articles exist on the potential contributions of quantum technologies to different facets of conventional smart city technologies, for example, cloud computing, AI, and blockchain. This article aims to bridge the ontological and epistemic gaps between the two types of urban technology. First, through a semi-systematic review of 80 related papers, we determine the essential types of urban quantum technology. Second, after establishing a comprehensive taxonomy of conventional (non-quantum) smart city technologies based on a lexical analysis of over 500 abstracts of scholarly documents on different technological aspects of smart cities, we relate the two classes of technologies, conventional smart city technologies and urban quantum technologies, through quantitative content analysis of 80 previously retrieved papers. For this goal, principal component analysis is performed, complemented by agglomerative hierarchical clustering and partial least squares path modeling. The findings are methodologically triangulated through a qualitative thematic analysis of potential uses of quantum technologies in identified smart city domains