Exploring the Relationship Between Smart Living and Female Entrepreneurship in the Contemporary City

The appeal of "smart" cities in the current urban trajectories has prompted cities across the globe to pursue smart city initiatives. However, in this transformation from city to smart city, a large part of the research corpus has mostly focused on technology and digital advancement in the city as a driver of this transformation, losing the intrinsic sense that cities should be human-based rather than tech-based or capital-based. In this article, we aim to investigate the relationship between the economic environment and the current smart city trajectories, focusing on the dimension of smart living. This dimension is under-investigated and controversial as it includes cities' practices that enable users and citizens to develop their potential and build their own life in a proper environment. Building on this state-of-the-art, this paper investigates the relationship between smart living practices in cities and the promotion of entrepreneurial activities focusing on female entrepreneurship, as women are identified as the most sensitive actors in the "smart living" dimension in the city. In doing this, we also include the complementary effect of public R&D investment as a driver in the "smart" city transition. Using a GMM method and a panel dataset that considers 30 Italian cities for 12 years, we demonstrate that the advancement of smart living practices in cities drives the promotion of female entrepreneurship. Furthermore, we highlight that public R&D affect this relationship. In doing so, this paper offers empirical contributions to the public and academic discourse on smart city trajectories at the interception between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship in contemporary cities.