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Cities and tourism entities invest massive resources into smart system initiatives as information technologies are a key factor for a city’s destination competitiveness. Moreover cities around the world are increasingly recognizing the smart tourism city concept and related strategies as means of optimizing sustainable environments. Particularly for cities facing emerging issues of residents’ negative perceptions towards tourism, smart tourism city empowers a city to rise to this challenge by creating urban spaces that residents and visitors can enjoy together. However, smart tourism city research initiatives still fail to address the full spectrum of related and potential developments. This study presents a conceptual approach to defining smart tourism city: the smart city and its components are defined and contrasted with smart tourism and its components. The resulting convergence—smart tourism city—is then examined in light of a number of pioneering examples of smart tourism cities and its vital roles in the age of sustainable development. The main purpose of this study is to show the interests of locals and tourists context and the roles of ‘smart’ government leadership to researchers and practitioners.

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Smart tourism is a social phenomenon arising from the convergence of information technology with the tourism experience. New ways of doing business, new patterns of experience and new problems concerning tourism destination image management and marketing are emerging due to the ubiquitous presence and influence of the internet and mobile devices. New conceptual tools are also available to enable researchers to further understand the social implications as well as the practical implementation of these new virtual and augmented smart tourism ecosystems. To this effect this paper introduces the constructivist paradigm and associated research methodologies as another toolbox for interpreting how smart tourism works as a form of soft power. The implications revealed by constructivism are that through smart tourism ecosystems, destination commodification and commoditization, experience and image formation are increasingly self-perpetuating, autonomous and organic social constructions. Researchers in information technology can use constructivist research to further explore these dynamic developments in smart tourism.