JULY 9 — For the past decade, we’ve been sold a seductive vision: the “smart city.” Gleaming control rooms, traffic lights that talk to each other, trash cans that tweet when they’re full, and a seamless digital utopia managed by benevolent algorithms. The narrative has been overwhelmingly technocentric—as if the city were a sluggish operating system merely awaiting a software patch.
But a new systematic literature review by Yuxi Dai, Sandra Hasanefendic, and Bart Bossink delivers a much-needed bucket of cold water. After sifting through the evidence on the smart city transformation process, their findings point to an inconvenient truth: technology is not the lead actor. It’s a supporting prop. The real drama—and the real bottleneck—is the human one.
The review’s central argument is deceptively simple: smart city transformation isn’t a linear technical process. It’s a messy, political, multi-actor negotiation. Dai and colleagues demonstrate that the role of stakeholders—citizens, private firms, public agencies, utilities, universities—is not peripheral. It is constitutive.
Most smart city failures aren’t due to buggy sensors or insufficient bandwidth. They fail because of stakeholder interaction breakdowns. Consider the typical pattern. A multinational tech vendor (say, Cisco or Siemens) partners with a forward-thinking municipal mayor’s office. They deploy an integrated platform for energy, mobility, and data. The technology works beautifully in the pilot zone. Then comes the scale-up. Suddenly, the mid-level public works director resists because the system bypasses his legacy authority. The privacy-conscious citizens revolt over data collection they never consented to. The utility company refuses to share grid data, seeing it as proprietary. The project stalls. The vendor blames “local politics.” The mayor blames “legacy systems.” The review by Dai et al. Would call this what it is: a failure to design for interaction, not just integration.
What’s particularly sharp in their analysis is how they unpack the interaction between stakeholders and technology. Technology is not a neutral tool that reshapes passive stakeholders. Instead, the review finds a recursive dance: Technology enables certain stakeholders (e.g., real-time data gives traffic managers new power). Technology constrains others (e.g., algorithmic decision-making sidelines community boards). And crucially, stakeholders re-interpret technology—turning a smart lighting system into a surveillance tool, or a mobility app into a platform for social exclusion.
The authors don’t say this explicitly, but the implication is radical: there is no such thing as a purely “smart” feature. Every sensor, every API, every dashboard is a political object that reshuffles power, trust, and accountability among the actors in the urban ecosystem.
The boldest finding is the identification of a recurring failure mode: over-investment in technical interoperability and under-investment in stakeholder alignment. Cities pour millions into IoT platforms and data lakes, but pennies into facilitation, conflict mediation, and collaborative governance training. The review essentially argues that the smart city transformation process is 20 per cent about getting systems to talk to each other—and 80 per cent about getting people and organizations to talk to each other.
Yet the authors remain cautiously academic. They stop short of saying what many practitioners whisper: that the current smart city industry is structurally designed to avoid this lesson. Why? Because selling sensors and software is lucrative. Selling stakeholder workshops and trust-building processes is not. The vendor-led model has a perverse incentive to keep the focus on technology, because that’s where the margins live.
If we take Dai, Hasanefendic, and Bossink seriously—and we should—the smart city transformation process needs a complete inversion. Step one: Don’t ask “What technology can we deploy?” Ask “Which stakeholders need to cooperate, and why aren’t they?” Step two: Map the formal and informal power relationships, the historical grievances, the data ownership battles, and the trust deficits. Step three: Co-design not just the technical architecture, but the governance architecture—who decides, who benefits, who is accountable, and how conflicts are resolved. Step four: Only then introduce enabling technologies as servants of that governance structure, not as its masters.
The review by Dai and colleagues is not an anti-technology polemic. It is a pro-realism intervention. The smart city transformation will happen—cities are too stressed by climate, migration, and fiscal constraints to ignore digital tools. But the current trajectory is wasteful and disillusioning. We are building expensive digital shells around empty social processes.
The evidence is clear: stakeholders and technology co-evolve in a delicate, contingent dance. Ignore the stakeholders, and the technology becomes a very expensive ghost in the machine. Pay attention to the messy, human, political work of interaction—and the smart city might finally become something more than a salesman’s PowerPoint. Let’s stop asking “How do we make cities smarter?” and start asking “Smarter for whom, governed by whom, and accountable to whom?”
* Professor Datuk Dr Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at [email protected].
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
