Sustainable Pedestrian Infrastructure for Smart Cities: A Bibliometric Review
Abstract
Sustainable pedestrian infrastructure has assumed a strategic role within contemporary smart city agendas, driven by concerns over mobility efficiency, environmental resilience, social equity, and public health. Although scholarly output in this area has expanded rapidly, the literature remains conceptually fragmented and methodologically dispersed across urban planning, transportation engineering, sustainability studies, and digital governance. A systematic bibliometric review of peer reviewed publications indexed in the Scopus database is employed to map the intellectual structure and thematic evolution of research on sustainable pedestrian infrastructure in smart city contexts. Using established bibliometric and science mapping techniques implemented through the Bibliometrix package and Biblioshiny interface, the analysis examines publication dynamics, influential sources and actors, collaboration patterns, and thematic configurations. The resulting map identifies a coherent core centered on pedestrian oriented urban planning, smart city governance, and sustainable development, supported by consolidated clusters on decision support frameworks, urban mobility management, and pedestrian safety. Technologically oriented strands such as intelligent transportation systems, Internet of Things applications, and vehicle to pedestrian communication are highly specialized yet weakly integrated, while climate responsive design, green infrastructure, and human scale urban morphology emerge as underdeveloped themes. Rather than advancing a new explanatory theory, this mapping delineates how existing theories, concepts, and methods are extended and recombined across research streams. The synthesized structure highlights persistent gaps, particularly the limited integration of objective performance metrics with subjective user experience and the marginal representation of medium and small city contexts. By clarifying dominant emphases and neglected interfaces, the analysis provides a concise cartography of knowledge trajectories to support more cumulative and context sensitive inquiry into sustainable pedestrian infrastructure within smart cities.