The aim of this study was to explore the keywords related to smart city concepts, and to understand their flow. This research used a keyword network analysis by collecting keywords from papers published on the web from Scopus, which is an international scholarly papers engine. The data were collected from before and after 2016, and since the amount of data has been growing rapidly after global agreements such as the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, we attempted to focus on adjacent years of publication. In order to understand the flow of research, we conducted a central analysis, which is widely used in quantitative research relating to social network analysis, and performed cluster analysis to identify relationships with related research. The results of the analysis are represented in the form of network maps, and the role of each keyword was clarified based on these network maps. In addition, the overall flow explained the change of flow through discarded and emerging keywords, and the relationships with related fields were explained through cluster analysis. The findings could serve as a basis for policymakers, urban managers, and researchers seeking a comprehensive understanding of the smart city concept in urban planning areas.Sustainability 2019, 11, 3155 2 of 25 adaption to environmental issues such as climate change and global warming, and efficiently utilizing and managing energy. In addition, Information and Communication Technologies (hereafter ICT) will extensively and effectively help cities achieve a comparative edge [4,8,9], and be used as the tools and means to develop Intelligent Transport Systems (hereafter ITS) with mobility information and the Internet of Things (hereafter IoT) [10][11][12], as well as to achieve urban policy making based on governance and open data [13][14][15]. Accordingly, in improving the urban quality of future urban areas, the term smart city is considered as an umbrella concept that includes various sub-concepts such as sustainable smart environments, smart technology, smart energy, smart transportation, smart mobility, and smart government [16][17][18][19][20][21].