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Blockchain for Cities - A Systematic Literature Review

Charles Shen, Feniosky Pena-Mora

arXiv:1812.10412v1cs.CY

TL;DR

Cities are pursuing blockchain initiatives despite limited understanding of how the technology applies to future urban development. This paper systematically reviews concrete use cases, analyzes blockchain system components, and develops classifications to support cross-sector understanding.

  • Problem

    The paper addresses the limited understanding of blockchain applicability to future cities amid the technology's early stage and growing urban initiatives.

  • Method

    The authors systematically review 159 concrete-use-case papers across nine urban sectors and analyze blockchain designs and prototypes using a component-based framework.

  • Results

    The review organizes urban blockchain use cases across nine sectors, identifies common application challenges, and provides a component-based framework plus two use-case classification methodologies.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The framework and classifications support a common understanding of blockchain use cases and enable cross-sector analysis of urban applications.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The review is limited to papers on concrete use cases with sufficient system-level coverage in specified sectors, and manual screening and sector placement introduce subjectivity.

Abstract

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Blockchain is considered one of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Numerous cities around the world are launching blockchain initiatives as part of the overall efforts toward shaping the urban future. However, the infancy stage of the blockchain industry leads to a severe gap between the knowledge we have and the actions urban policy makers are taking. This paper is an effort to narrow this rift. We provide a systematic literature review on concrete blockchain use cases proposed by the research community. At the macro-level, we discuss and organize use cases from 159 selected papers into nine sectors recognized as crucial for sustainable and smart urban future. At the micro-level, we identify a component-based framework and analyze the design and prototypes of blockchain systems studied in a subset of 71 papers. The high-level use case review allows us to illustrate the relationship between them and the four pillars of urban sustainability: social, economic, environmental, and governmental. The system level analysis helps us highlight interesting inconsistencies between well-known blockchain applicability decision rules and the approaches taken by the literature. We also offer two classification methodologies for blockchain use cases and elaborate on how they can be applied to stimulate cross-sector insights in the blockchain knowledge domain.

I. INTRODUCTION

Cities face rapid urbanization and interconnected problems, while blockchain initiatives expand despite limited understanding of their societal effects and urban applicability. This paper addresses the gap through a systematic review of concrete use cases and system designs for sustainable and smart cities.

  • Urbanization produces congestion, pollution, resource depletion, and social inequality, creating responsibilities for cities and urban policy makers.
  • Blockchain initiatives are spreading across cities, but its premature knowledge base leaves uncertainty about where the technology can produce societal effects.
  • The review examines concrete blockchain use cases in academic literature and limits its scope to papers with extensive system coverage.
  • It organizes 159 selected papers across nine sectors central to sustainable and smart-city frameworks.
  • A component-based analysis of 71 papers examines design and implementation choices and identifies gaps relative to common blockchain applicability criteria.
  • Two role-based and business-model-based classifications are proposed to support cross-sector blockchain application analysis.

B. FROM CRYPTO CURRENCY TO EVERYTHING

Blockchain expanded from cryptocurrency into general-purpose business applications through smart contracts and broader token models. These developments enable programmable asset exchange and varied incentive structures, while proof-of-stake addresses proof-of-work’s energy concern with a decentralization trade-off.

  • Smart contracts extend blockchain beyond cryptocurrency by executing computer-coded business logic automatically under designated triggering conditions.
  • Blockchain smart contracts are centrally uncontrolled, difficult to modify after deployment, and suited to cost-effective multi-party agreements.
  • Crypto tokens evolved from digital currency into tradable fungible and non-fungible assets, making asset exchange programmable.
  • Utility and security models give tokens either transactional utility or securities-like functions.
  • Proof-of-stake reduces proof-of-work’s intensive energy consumption by selecting validators according to network stake.
  • Delegated proof-of-stake improves resilience to original proof-of-stake problems but reduces decentralization.

C. FROM PERMISSIONLESS TO PERMISSIONED

Permissionless blockchains allow broad participation and rely on economic or computational incentives, whereas permissioned systems control node participation and support different consensus choices. The paper situates these models within urban-sector applications and their associated security risks.

  • Permissionless blockchains allow any node to participate, while permissioned blockchains restrict participation and are more suitable for controlled settings.
  • Permissioned systems can use Byzantine fault-tolerance protocols because their known validators permit broader consensus options.
  • Practical Byzantine fault tolerance is typically suitable only for systems with relatively few nodes and has not been proven.
  • Permissioned blockchains may provide full or limited smart-contract capabilities, while application-specific tokens can remain applicable without infrastructure incentives.
  • Permissionless participation creates vulnerabilities including double spending, Sybil attacks, 51% attacks, and denial of service.
  • The review organizes urban blockchain use cases into sectors adopted from established smart- and sustainable-city frameworks, excluding ICT to focus on non-digital urban applications.

B. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The study asks which blockchain use cases matter for smart and sustainable cities, how to analyze them across sectors, and how to assess their sustainability and applicability. It answers these questions through a systematic review protocol, targeted database search, and screening for concrete system-level use cases.

  • The review asks what blockchain use cases appear in key urban sectors and how their sustainability impacts and applicability should be evaluated.
  • It also seeks a unified framework and taxonomies that support cross-sector use-case analysis.
  • The authors follow best practices for systematic reviews and a standard protocol for selecting literature.
  • Searches cover major focused and multidisciplinary academic databases, targeting journal and conference literature on blockchain applications for cities.
  • D. SEARCH PROCESS: The initial search found 3827 papers using blockchain as the search term because city- or urban-specific terms were too restrictive.
  • D. SEARCH PROCESS: Screening retained papers with sufficient system design or prototype evaluation across nine urban sectors and excluded conceptual discussions lacking concrete system coverage.
  • IV. RELATED WORK: Compared with prior reviews, this study focuses on general-purpose blockchain use cases and applies component-based analysis for cross-sector design and implementation insights.

V. APPLICATION-ORIENTED USE CASE REVIEW

The review organizes blockchain use cases across urban governance and citizen engagement, emphasizing progressive models that transform administration and support collaborative decision-making.

  • Review scope: The review assigns each use case to one primary sector while recognizing that individual use cases can involve multiple sectors.This classification facilitates sector-specific discussion before later cross-sector analysis.
  • Governance and citizen engagement: Surveyed use cases primarily target smart administration and smart urban collaboration rather than more conservative smart-city governance models.These systems transform existing processes, improve citizen services, and support collaborative governance.
  • Innovative IT transformation for existing processes: Blockchain proposals transform government document sharing, recording exchanges on-chain for secure access control and robust information management.Examples include inter-agency sharing catalogs and blockchain-recorded transactions.
  • Innovative IT transformation for existing processes: E-voting systems seek anonymity, privacy, and transparency, while taxation systems preserve immutable transaction records and help authorities monitor taxable activity.The surveyed systems address both government formation through voting and government financing through tax administration.
  • Citizen-centric collaborative urban governance: Collaborative governance proposals use blockchain to support decentralized, participatory decision-making and connect citizens’ needs with policy drafting, validation, and implementation.Related systems include urban policy mechanisms and healthcare decision-support frameworks using stakeholder rules, open data, and anonymized participant data.

B. EDUCATION, CULTURE, SCIENCE AND INNOVATION

The surveyed literature applies blockchain to education, research, media, healthcare, and insurance, mainly to preserve records, improve traceability, and manage access or transactions.

  • Education and learning activities: Educational systems use blockchain to maintain immutable records of learning, credentials, creative work, and volunteering activities across organizations.Proposals cover scholarly reputation, learner activity logs, transferable course credits, certificate management, and persistent volunteering records.
  • Science, innovation and IP protection: Research applications span experimentation, reproducible collaboration, peer review, publishing, and intellectual-property protection through recorded data and auditable workflows.Blockchain records datasets and results, supports signatory-based release, and enables reproducible research choreographies.
  • Media, culture and entertainment: Media and entertainment systems register digital assets, manage ticket transfers, and use decentralized mechanisms for fairness, transparency, and privacy.The literature also includes a caution that blockchain-based media-rights financialization may curtail artistic and critical potential.
  • Well-being, health and safety: Healthcare proposals address clinical-trial integrity, interoperable medical records, privacy-preserving access, mobile health data, and drug or food supply-chain traceability.Systems record trial revisions, control access to sensitive records, log sensor-generated health data, and trace products to counter counterfeiting.
  • Insurance: Insurance applications cover policy lifecycles, claims, micro-insurance, and cyber insurance using fine-grained control and automated feedback mechanisms.Examples include pay-as-you-go car insurance and real-time immutable feedback among cyber-insurance participants.

D. ECONOMY

Economic use cases apply blockchain to collaborative production, commerce, reputation, sharing, vehicles, and goods transportation, emphasizing distributed coordination and traceability.

  • Collaborative business processes and service exchanges: Blockchain proposals support collaborative business processes, service exchanges, software development, autonomous-agent coordination, and distributed manufacturing.Examples include prosumer manufacturing, collaborative product design, oracle-supported code verification, and unmanned aerial-vehicle delivery networks.
  • E-commerce: Commerce systems use blockchain for peer-to-peer marketplaces, ownership records, counterfeit detection, advertising-integrity checks, vending information, and machine payments.The surveyed designs cover both human commerce and machine-to-machine transactions, including aggregated micropayments.
  • Reputation systems: Reputation systems record binary or textual customer evaluations on blockchain, sometimes requiring crypto-token payments for reviews.The reviewed mechanisms target trust and accountability in file transfer and e-commerce settings.
  • Sharing economy: Sharing-economy systems enable privacy-preserving rentals, foreign-currency exchange, and decentralized organizations that evaluate contributions and distribute value.These proposals use blockchain to coordinate peer transactions and collaborative production models.
  • Transportation: Transportation applications manage vehicle histories, digitize shipping documentation, automate compliance, and support decentralized intelligent-transportation communications.Vehicle data systems address fraud, while transport proposals cover cargo tracing, security credentials, privacy-preserving announcements, and software updates.

F. ENERGY

Energy research applies blockchain to grid security, transparent metering, peer-to-peer electricity markets, electric-vehicle charging, and decentralized coordination of energy resources.

  • Grid security and meter transparency: Blockchain-based grid-security proposals broadcast signed meter readings for peer validation and preserve them on private blockchains for transparent utility monitoring.These systems target data security and consumer understanding of appliance electricity use.
  • Peer-to-peer energy trading: Peer-to-peer energy trading systems coordinate prosumers, demand and supply, market settlement, payments, rewards, and privacy in smart-grid and microgrid settings.Research includes optimal power-flow scheduling, automated negotiation, double auctions, credit-based payments, and privacy-preserving transactions.
  • Research scope: Energy blockchain research spans both system designs and prototypes, with many proposals addressing throughput, settlement speed, and market coordination.Credit-based payment mechanisms are presented as one response to low throughput in typical blockchains.
  • Electric vehicle and grid: The Brooklyn Microgrid is an operating test bed where blockchain records consumption and generation data and supports electricity transactions through market mechanisms.The microgrid can operate as a backup decoupled from the traditional grid during power outages.
  • Electric vehicle and grid: Electric-vehicle systems use blockchain to coordinate autonomous charging-station selection, recharge execution, power-fluctuation reduction, and peer-to-peer vehicle electricity trading.The proposed designs address latency, security, cost, grid balance, and mobile charging scenarios.

G. BUILT ENVIRONMENT

The surveyed literature treats built-environment blockchain applications as relatively underexplored, with most identified work still at the conceptual or design stage. The broader framework connects such use cases to external actors and assets, while blockchain infrastructure supplies consensus, contracts, and tokens.

  • G. BUILT ENVIRONMENT: Built-environment and AEC blockchain applications are relatively underexplored, and most identified papers remain in conceptual discussion or design.The literature highlights trust, information sharing, and process automation as important potential benefits for construction engineering.
  • G. BUILT ENVIRONMENT: The component-based framework links external writers and readers to on-chain or off-chain assets through transparency, privacy, and anonymity requirements.The framework distinguishes external use-case factors from internal blockchain infrastructure while treating assets as the linkage between them.
  • G. BUILT ENVIRONMENT: The framework’s blockchain infrastructure comprises distributed consensus, smart contracts, and crypto tokens supporting the analyzed use cases.
  • G. BUILT ENVIRONMENT: The component analysis uses a 71-paper subset because surveyed papers do not consistently document every framework aspect.The selected subset covers all prior sectors except Water and Waste Management, and includes prototypes plus sufficiently detailed non-implementation studies.

A. ASSETS

The reviewed blockchain use cases center on off-chain assets that must be digitally represented and connected to blockchain records. Their access and record requirements vary across writers, readers, transparency, privacy, and anonymity, with dedicated mechanisms used when confidentiality is needed.

  • A. ASSETS: All surveyed blockchain applications involve off-chain assets, distinguishing them from pure cryptocurrency applications that may use only on-chain assets.Assets may be digital by origin or digitized from physical and intangible entities before being placed on-chain.
  • A. ASSETS: Physical assets can be represented through identifiers such as EPCs, VINs, RFID tags, or ORCIDs, while natural resources use recorded ownership and value attributes.
  • A. ASSETS: Blockchain systems distinguish external writers from validating nodes: writers submit database changes, but internal mechanisms decide whether updates are accepted.
  • A. ASSETS: Writing and reading permissions may be public or private, with writing privileges either interchangeable among participants or asymmetric across roles.Product registration gives manufacturers authority to register products while the public may update ownership, illustrating asymmetric privileges.
  • A. ASSETS: Off-chain asset records balance blockchain transparency with privacy and anonymity requirements through pseudo-identities, encryption, and privacy-preserving transactions.Zero-knowledge proofs can establish transaction validity without revealing the underlying secret, identity, or amount.

E. UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES

Among the analyzed prototypes, Ethereum is the most frequently identified blockchain, followed by Hyperledger, Bitcoin, and MultiChain. Platform choices reflect differing support for smart contracts, enterprise features, payment security, privacy, tokens, and other application needs.

  • E. UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES: Ethereum was the most frequently identified platform, appearing in 28 of 43 papers that declared a blockchain type.Hyperledger appeared in 9 papers, while Bitcoin and MultiChain each appeared in 5.
  • E. UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES: Ethereum spans nearly all surveyed sectors, although most prototypes use a testnet or separate private network because of their early-stage nature.
  • E. UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES: Hyperledger Fabric is among the two most popular platforms and provides smart contracts plus built-in features suited to enterprise applications.
  • E. UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES: Bitcoin remains useful for non-cryptocurrency research because its established public network provides a secure and robust payment system despite limited scripting capability.
  • E. UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES: MultiChain matched Bitcoin’s frequency in the dataset and combines permissioned operation with a native token and stream functionality, despite limited business-logic support.

F. CONSENSUS MECHANISMS

The review identifies proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, Byzantine fault tolerance, and proof-of-importance among the consensus mechanisms used in blockchain applications. It also presents smart-contract business models spanning immutable records, access control, collective decisions, and peer-to-peer markets.

  • Proof-of-work appears in at least half of the studied cases, while proof-of-stake is initially rare but would reach 31 cases if Ethereum is counted as proof-of-stake.
  • At least 17 use cases support Byzantine fault tolerance-style consensus, including 9 Hyperledger Fabric cases.
  • Proof-of-importance assigns token-mining privileges according to user importance, considering holdings, transaction volume, and transaction counterparties.
  • Smart-contract business models comprise immutable records, access control, collective decisions, and peer-to-peer markets, with immutable records foundational and the other categories potentially intersecting.
  • Peer-to-peer energy markets use smart contracts for double auctions, negotiation, settlement, payments, power-flow estimation, optimization, and control.

H. CRYPTO TOKEN SYSTEMS

The review finds utility tokens predominant, with payments, application-specific representations, and incentives supporting blockchain business logic across urban domains. These use cases span sustainability applications, especially commerce, transportation, green energy, health, education, and governance.

  • H. CRYPTO TOKEN SYSTEMS: Utility tokens are the predominant crypto token model in the surveyed blockchain use cases.The review gives medical-data sharing as an infrastructure-level example in which Ether pays for posting, updating, and accessing records.
  • H. CRYPTO TOKEN SYSTEMS: Application-level tokens represent tax credits, dividends, software entitlements, and completed higher-education course credits.
  • H. CRYPTO TOKEN SYSTEMS: Payments use Bitcoin or application-specific tokens for electricity, electric-vehicle grid interactions, autonomous services, and energy trading.
  • H. CRYPTO TOKEN SYSTEMS: Token incentives encourage desired behaviors and can sustain business logic, such as registering products after supply-chain transactions.
  • H. CRYPTO TOKEN SYSTEMS: Payment utilities can still be implemented on permissioned platforms without built-in token systems through transaction structures that preserve historical records for verification.
  • SUSTAINABILITY GOALS: Surveyed use cases cover all four sustainability dimensions, with strong representation in health, education, commerce, transportation, green energy, and governance but fewer cases for built-environment, social-diversity, materials, water, waste, and climate-resilience topics.

B. BLOCKCHAIN USE CASE APPLICABILITY

The review finds that blockchain applicability decision rules do not consistently match reported use cases, particularly when systems address intermediaries, permissions, or physical assets. It therefore emphasizes component-based analysis, interface security, and cross-sector classification to clarify design choices and stimulate reuse across domains.

  • B. BLOCKCHAIN USE CASE APPLICABILITY: Reported blockchain use cases sometimes conflict with established applicability decision trees, motivating more systematic component-based analysis rather than simple right-or-wrong judgments.
  • B. BLOCKCHAIN USE CASE APPLICABILITY: Permissionless blockchains can support controlled writing or private reading through smart contracts or encryption, contrary to rules that recommend permissioned or private systems.
  • THE PHYSICAL-CYBER-CHAIN INTERFACE PROBLEM: Physical-asset supply-chain systems frequently digitalize assets onto blockchains despite decision rules favoring digital assets, making the physical-cyber-chain interface a central security concern.
  • THE PHYSICAL-CYBER-CHAIN INTERFACE PROBLEM: Stakeholders may verify mapped records in voting or ticketing systems, but many other applications require more sophisticated methods to address interface risks.
  • THE PHYSICAL-CYBER-CHAIN INTERFACE PROBLEM: Off-chain asset mapping is universal in non-cryptocurrency blockchain use cases, and tampered inputs such as smart-meter readings can be difficult for recipients to detect.
  • CASE CLASSIFICATION: The paper proposes role-based and business-model classifications so use cases can be compared across sectors and solutions can draw on analogous categories in different industries.

VIII. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

The review addresses limited understanding of blockchain’s applicability to future cities by organizing concrete use cases and analyzing their system designs. It identifies uneven sector attention, recurring implementation challenges, and methodological limits while proposing further comparison with industry use cases.

  • The review examined 159 concrete blockchain use-case papers across nine sectors relevant to sustainable and smart cities.Its application-oriented analysis responds to concerns about blockchain’s infancy and limited applicability knowledge for future cities.
  • The literature gives less attention to natural environment, water and waste management, and the built environment than to energy, transportation, economy, healthcare, education, and governance.
  • Across sectors, blockchain applications face infrastructure performance and scalability, interoperability, security, smart-contract, legal, and regulatory challenges.
  • A component-based analysis of 71 papers examined assets, writers, readers, blockchain infrastructure, consensus algorithms, smart contracts, and crypto-token systems.
  • B. LIMITATIONS: The review’s scope was limited to concrete use cases with sufficient system coverage in specified sectors, while manual screening and sector assignment introduced subjectivity.The authors acknowledge that high-quality papers could have been excluded.
  • C. FUTURE WORK: Future work should assemble more blockchain use cases operating in industry to compare them with early research prototypes and identify benefits for research and industry.
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