Smart Cities Governance in the SADC Region: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

Urban scholarship and practices surrounding 'smart' cities address the growing datafication of urban life and governance, a process that has mixed outcomes, particularly for African cities. For this reason, this paper offers a systematic review of literature on smart cities in the South African Development Community (SADC) countries, with a focus on understanding the complexities of urban dynamics and governance within the region. It takes as its starting point the SmartCityZA collection in the uKESA repository, expanded and triangulated with a Scopus search. The novelty of this literature review is that it is constituted by policy documents and reports, as well as academic papers. This was done purposefully to interrogate not only the state of smart city knowledge in SADC but also the state of smart city practice in the region. The review found five important themes regarding smart governance in the region: (1) the social development promises of the smart city, (2) institutionalising smart city governance, (3) smart cities and digital citizenship, (4) smart city [as] infrastructure and (5) approaches to ‘smarting’ the city. The study recommends more attention to the smart city agendas and to the impacts of the digitalisation and datafication of urbanism, but also suggests more considered local and governance-oriented lenses for such agendas if they are to be relevant for communities in the SADC region. It concludes that smart cities governance literature is plentiful in South Africa, but that more empirical research is needed, particularly in the other SADC countries.