Knowledge Management in Smart City Development: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The notion of ‘smart cities’ has gained the attention of policymakers, urban developers and government authorities around the world and is emerging as a major response to urbanization, economic regeneration and other environmental challenges faced by cities globally. Smart cities depend not only on a city's endowment of hard infrastructure (physical capital), but also and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (human and social capital). This emerging role of cities as information hubs and knowledge repositories is particularly decisive for urban competitiveness. Arguably, many smart city projects die after the pilot stage and the lessons learned from previous projects never scale up to inform subsequent implementations. This is a major impediment in the future development of smart cities, particularly around facilitating successful technological and procedural replication. In line with recent calls for a cautious rethink of the very rationale and relevance of the smart cities debate pointing to new avenues of research into interdisciplinary aspects, this paper reviews the extant smart city literature in an attempt to identify current theoretical streams and provide further insight into the role of Knowledge Management in smart city development. It also explores how cities can realise the full benefits of tacit knowledge, learning and collaboration. A review of forty-eight peer-reviewed articles is conducted. The findings suggest the lack of Knowledge Management models for smart city replication and reveal how socio-technical approaches can help to support collaboration and knowledge sharing. Policy recommendations for local and national governments on how cities can benefit from a shift towards collaborative knowledge-making are also provided.