Evolution of the smart city: three extensions to governance, sustainability, and decent urbanisation from an ICT-based urban solution

The smart city, which emphasizes more effective urban management using information and communication technologies (ICT), now has greater implications. This paper first reviews the evolving features of the smart city focusing on its extension from an ICT-based urban solution to the domains of governance, sustainability, and decent urbanisation. Expectations and concerns about advanced ICT as an urban solution have formed a body of literature of civic governance with a focus on the citizen, which now incorporates a discussion of the democratic management of data. What made the smart city dominant in urban discourse is its merging with another leading discourse–that of the ‘sustainable city’–in the early 2010s, which had the most popularity in the field since the 1990s. The boundary of the smart city extended further, representing the desire of emerging cities to provide core urban infrastructures with an expectation of economic growth in the mid-2010s. This paper then focuses on the implications of this widened sphere of the smart city. It aims to uncover how the concept of ‘smart city’ has evolved over time, leading to the conclusion of how the traditional values of urban studies are growing in the new sphere of the smart city and why it is currently important to consider the context-based local smart city and to develop affordable smart cities in future smart city practice and research.