Smart city construction and urban public service provision performance: a digital governance perspective

Smart city construction is a critical pathway and a pragmatic choice for advancing the modernization and transformation of public services. This study develops a process-mechanism model of public value creation in the field of smart city construction and, using panel data from Chinese cities over 2009–2021, empirically examines the effects of smart city construction on public service provision performance and the underlying mechanisms. The results show that: (1) smart city construction significantly improves public service provision performance, and the improvement is asymmetric, with a stronger effect on the performance of livelihood and development-oriented services; (2) government digital governance constitutes a key mediating mechanism through which smart city construction enhances public service provision performance, whereas citizen digital governance exerts a positive mediating effect only under conditions of high government digital governance; (3) smart city construction is complementary to technology-oriented digital development policies and infrastructure-oriented digital development policies in improving public service provision performance. From a digital governance perspective, this study systematically identifies the key pathways and boundary conditions through which smart city construction enhances public service provision performance, providing useful insights into leveraging digital technologies to modernize urban governance.