Smart Cities as a New Quality of Life Standard

Over the past ten years, the creation of smart cities has become a priority in the development of the digital economy over the world. It is reflected not only in official documents of the leading international organisations including the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission but also in scientific research of many foreign scientists. There are several approaches to the definition of the term “smart city”. This article will overcome some theoretical gaps in a holistic research approach to the study of smart cities, especially in terms of the impact of information and telecommunication technologies on improving the quality of life and well-being of urban residents, because creating a comfortable living environment is one of the most essential tasks in the concept of a smart city. The author paid particular attention to the analysis of the literature on the problems of smart cities based on the international databases of scientific citing — Web of Science and Scopus; a resulting publication stream made it possible to assess the effectiveness of research in subject areas related to economics. The most significant number of projects to create smart cities were implemented in European cities. Researchers from the UK made a substantial contribution to the development of international standards. In Russian practice, this topic is just beginning its development, both in legal and regulatory documents and in economic research. An important step in solving this problem should be the implementation of the national program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation” and the project “Smart City” in the framework of the national project “Housing and Urban Environment” in 2019.