Abstract:As the country with the largest number of super-megacities in the world, China's urban planning and governance in recent years are facing great challenges brought about by the changes of macro factors such as population aging, "dual carbon" goal and deep adjustment of industrial structure etc. The construction of new smart cities is still one of the important approaches of the innovation-driven national high-quality development strategy during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period. The analysis of the global smart city technology hotspots and their evolution patterns has important reference value for the strategic planning and policy and regulation formulation of smart city in China. However, at present, there are few relevant studies at home and abroad, especially the analysis on the evolution pattern of smart city technology hotspot is almost blank. This paper puts forward an integrated framework that includes traditional topic modeling, patent text analysis and the evolution of topic-strength, and then more accurately portrays the knowledge map of the technology evolution on smart-city. This work reported by this paper may have a certain implication for the corresponding policy-making and strategy implementation in the new era. Smart city is a typical interdisciplinary topic. Although this paper refers to the definition of smart city in many mainstream literatures, patent search cannot completely cover all the technology fields related to smart city. However, the patent search strategy and technology hot spot analysis method proposed in this paper for a cross-topic may provide a new idea for intelligence gathering and analysis.