Contemporary Social Science

Smart cities in the Global South: Retrospect and Prospect

Smart cities have become a central feature of urban development strategies worldwide, particularly in the Global South, where rapid urbanisation, infrastructure deficits, environmental pressures, and persistent social inequalities coincide with ambitious digital transformation agendas. By 2050, more than 70% of the global population is expected to live in urban areas, with around 90% of future urban growth occurring in Asia and Africa (UN Habitat, 2022). In response, governments and city authorities are increasingly turning to digital technologies, data infrastructures, and innovative governance arrangements to improve urban management, stimulate economic growth, and address sustainability challenges.

The notion of the smart city has travelled through global policy circuits as a model of technological modernisation, urban efficiency, and data-driven governance (Kummitha and Crutzen, 2017; Marchesani et al., 2026; Marchesani & Ceci, 2026). Yet, while the concept of the smart city remains contested, it is commonly understood as encompassing three interconnected dimensions: i) the deployment of digital and networked infrastructure to improve governance and innovation; ii) the promotion of business- and creativity-driven urban development rooted in digitally enabled futures; and iii) attention to social inclusion and environmental sustainability (Albino et al., 2015).

Nevertheless, the meaning, implementation, and consequences of smart-city initiatives vary considerably across contexts, raising important questions about their governance, effectiveness, and social impacts (Marchesani and Kummitha, 2026). Indeed, experiences in the Global South highlight that smart-city development is never merely technological. It is embedded in social and institutional contexts where urban needs, political authority, corporate power, citizen agency, and resource allocation are deeply contested. Despite policy interest and grassroots transformation in the Global South, the literature still lags in understanding local realities (Kitchin, 2015).

This Special Collection adopts a dual Retrospect and Prospect perspective on smart cities in the Global South. Retrospect refers to the need to consolidate what has been established about how smart-city ideas, technologies, and governance structures have been translated, institutionalised, resisted, and experienced across Global South contexts. Prospect refers to the need to identify where the field should go next, especially as smart urbanism becomes increasingly connected to questions of power, inequality, informality, participation and inclusion, platform capitalism, environmental transition, institutional change, and public policy. Together, these perspectives offer a framework for understanding both the achievements and limitations of smart-city development while shaping future research agendas.

The Global South offers a crucial analytical lens for advancing smart-city research. Several governments and cities have already adopted large-scale smart-city strategies. India’s Smart Cities Mission seeks to transform 100 cities through technological innovation and urban redevelopment. Similarly, smart-city objectives are embedded in long-term national development frameworks such as Kenya Vision 2030 and Rwanda Vision 2050. Across Latin America, cities such as Rio de Janeiro have gained international attention for deploying integrated urban management systems that treat the city as a complex “system of systems.” However, these cases also demonstrate that smart-city development is not simply a matter of imitating technological models from elsewhere. Local histories, political economies, institutional arrangements, infrastructures, and social struggles significantly shape how smart-city initiatives are interpreted, adapted, contested, or rejected (Kummitha, 2019, 2025).

Governance challenges also remain significant. Many cities pursue smart-city ambitions under fiscal constraints, institutional fragmentation, limited administrative capacity, and dependence on external technology providers. As a result, corporate actors and technology vendors may shape governance arrangements whose priorities do not necessarily align with local democratic institutions (Prakash and Karvonen, 2026; Datta, 2018).

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is further reshaping these debates, with AI increasingly embedded in Smart City infrastructures and automating urban decision-making processes (Praharaj, 2025; Marchesani et al., 2026). Decisions may increasingly be shaped by algorithms, training data, and vendor-controlled systems rather than democratic deliberation (Cugurullo & Xu, 2025). Moreover, AI can reinforce existing inequalities if service provision and resource allocation become concentrated in areas with richer data availability. Understanding responsible AI adoption, governance mechanisms, and public value creation is therefore becoming an urgent priority for future smart-city research.

Expected Contributions

This Special Collection seeks to advance interdisciplinary social science research on smart cities in the Global South by consolidating existing knowledge while identifying future directions for theory, policy, and practice. It seeks to move the field beyond descriptive accounts of smart-city adoption by asking how smart-city transitions are developed over time.

It welcomes qualitative, quantitative, comparative, historical, and mixed-method approaches, including case studies, ethnographies, surveys, archival research, and large-scale empirical analyses. In doing so, it invites contributions from sociology, public policy, political economy, development studies, human geography, management and organisation studies, science and technology studies, regional and urban studies, and related social science disciplines.

Ultimately, contributions should demonstrate how experiences from the Global South challenge dominant assumptions about smart cities, illuminate the governance and power dynamics shaping digital urban transformation, and generate insights relevant to policymakers, practitioners, and scholars worldwide.

We encourage the submission of original articles, both theoretical and empirical, as well as shorter Comment pieces, which investigate and analyse from either single-disciplinary and/or multi-disciplinary perspectives on the following, but not limited to, topics relating to Smart Cities in the Global South:

• Re-interpreting Smart-City models in different Global South political & institutional contexts (including local actor vis-à-vis corporate perspectives)
• Provincialisation & Postcolonial Perspectives on Smart City Development in the Global South
• Governance, Institutions and Smart Cities in the Global South
• Smart City Initiatives and Urban Inequality in the Global South
• Digital Technologies and Basic Urban Needs in the Global South
• Citizen Participation and Inclusion in Smart City Initiatives
•  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Smart City Infrastructures, including issues of data collection/usage, ethics, privacy, decision-making and accountability   
• Smart City policies and initiatives, especially in relation to adoption and use of AI technologies
• Comparisons between Smart City models and initiatives in the Global South vis-à-vis the Global North 
• Lessons from Smart Cities in the Global South    

References

Albino, V., Berardi, U., & Dangelico, R. M. (2015). Smart cities: Definitions, dimensions, performance, and initiatives. Journal of urban technology, 22(1), 3-21.

Cugurullo, F., & Xu, Y. (2025). When AIs become oracles: Generative artificial intelligence, anticipatory urban governance, and the future of cities. Policy and Society, 44(1), 98-115.

Datta, A., (2019). Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India’s smart urban age, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(3): 393-410.

Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8, 131–136

Kummitha, R.K.R.,& Crutzen, N., (2017). How do we understand smart cities: an evolutionary perspective, Cities, 67, 43-52.

Kummitha, R.K.R., (2019). Smart cities and entrepreneurship: an agenda for future research, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 149, 119763.

Kummitha, R.K.R., (2025). Smart city governance: Assessing modes of citizen engagement, Regional Studies, 59(1): 2399262.

Marchesani, F., Ceci, F., & McCarthy, I. P. (2026). The impact of digital technologies and social media on the urban attractiveness of smart cities. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 222, 124396.

Marchesani, F., & Ceci, F. (2026). Rules and responsibilities in smart city governance: Exploring the architecture of data value chain. Government Information Quarterly, 43(1), 102115.

Prakash, D., & Karvonen, A,. (2026). Institutional logics of the smart city and the emergence of new configuration of local governance, Cities, 171, 106727.

UN-Habitat. (2022). World Cities Report 2022: Envisaging the Future of Cities. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. https://doi.org/10.18356/9789210014380

Marchesani, F., & Kummitha, R.K.R., (2026).The paradox of smart cities: exploring the interaction between youth migration and urban exclusion, Regional Studies, 2596742.

Praharaj, S. (2025). Command and control governance in the 100 smart cities mission in India: Urban innovation or utopias?. Applied Geography, 184, 103766.