A systematic review of smart city governance in the Southern African Development Community

Abstract

This paper offers a systematic review of literature on smart cities in the Southern African Development Community countries, with a focus on the complexities of urban dynamics and governance within the region. The novelty of this qualitative systematic review is that it includes policy documents and reports as well as academic papers to interrogate the state of both smart city knowledge and smart city practice in the region. The review identified five research themes, namely, (1) the social development promises of the smart city, (2) institutionalizing smart city governance, (3) smart cities and digital citizenship, (4) smart city (as) infrastructure and (5) approaches to ‘smarting’ the city. The study shows that, for a comprehensive agenda on smart city research, more attention should be given to smart city projects and the impacts of digitalization and datafication, but it also finds that more considered local and governance-oriented lenses for such agendas are necessary if they are to be relevant to the Southern African Development Community region. This study is a systematic review that combines both academic and policy sources to assess the state of smart cities in the Southern African Development Community. It found five major themes that call for a more nuanced approach to smart city governance that accounts for local variations.