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This paper investigates how social value is operationalised in urban regeneration and how digital reporting platforms shape the measurement and governance of social sustainability. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with UK social value professionals and a resident survey conducted within the Elephant and Castle regeneration programme in London, the study examines how platform-based systems translate procurement commitments into auditable performance categories. These systems embed predefined classification schemas, proxy valuation metrics and rule-based validation procedures that structure how outcomes become visible and comparable across projects. The findings indicate that digital reporting platforms enhance oversight and inter-project benchmarking but prioritise outcomes that align with measurable procurement indicators. Employment generation, apprenticeships and local procurement expenditure dominate reported performance, while relational and place-based outcomes, such as trust, belonging and neighbourhood continuity, remain marginal. Reporting requirements generate substantial evidencing burdens across supply chains, may introduce data distortions through proxy-based and threshold-led reporting, and can concentrate engagement at early project stages, limiting sustained community influence and creating technical barriers to participation. The analysis highlights how digital reporting platforms can operate as governance infrastructures within smart city environments, shaping what is prioritised, funded and recognised as credible impact. The findings provide practical insights for the design of more inclusive and proportionate digital accountability systems for sustainable local development.

The UN Paris Agreement of November 2016 recognises the need for a ‘cleaner and more efficient energy system’ as a core policy goal to address climate change. The spatial and urban form of cities is a key factor in achieving more efficient energy production and consumption and becomes more important with rapid urbanisation across much of the world. City urban form and planning are therefore potentially powerful levers for the energy transition. This paper examines the extent to which city ‘energy strategies’ address the critical spatial and urban form characteristics of cities as a means to achieve a more efficient energy system. We construct an assessment framework of key aspects of the spatial and urban development of cities related to transport and accessibility and urban form. The framework is used to assess the degree to which energy strategies take into consideration aspects of urban development in four cities that are taking significant action on the energy policy: Hong Kong Oakland, Oslo, and Vancouver. We conclude that in these cities there is only fragmentary consideration of the potential of shaping spatial and urban form in the interests of energy efficiency.

Smart cities are rapidly gaining momentum around the world as new opportunities to shift towards a sustainable urban future. Despite their promising solutions, there is so far little evidence on how smart city initiatives can achieve urban sustainability. This study explores the impact of smartness on urban sustainability by introducing the concept of smart complementarity and investigating whether the systemic governance of smart complementarities has a positive impact on sustainability. To this end, we employ a panel vector autoregression model with panel data for 26 smart cities from 2009 to 2019 to test the complex dynamic relationships between smart city drivers and dimensions of sustainability. Such analysis seems crucial for smart city governance and whether the vision of a smart agenda is compatible with urban sustainability. The findings suggest that while smart city initiatives have improved economic sustainability, they have compromised environmental and social sustainability. This points to the need for a coordinated approach to address the complexity of urban systems and sustainability challenges.

The fusion of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (AI-IoT, also widely referred to as AIoT) offers transformative potential for smart cities, yet presents a critical challenge: how to process heterogeneous data streams from intelligent sensing—particularly crowd sensing data derived from citizen interactions like text, voice, and system logs—into reliable intelligence for sustainable urban governance. To address this challenge, we introduce the Intelligent Multimodal Ticket Processing System (IMTPS), a novel AI-IoT smart system. Unlike ad hoc solutions, the novelty of IMTPS resides in its theoretically grounded architecture, which orchestrates Information Theory and Game Theory for efficient, verifiable extraction, and employs Causal Inference and Meta-Learning for robust reasoning, thereby synergistically converting noisy, heterogeneous data streams into reliable governance intelligence. This principled design endows IMTPS with four foundational capabilities essential for modern smart city applications: Sustainable and Efficient AI-IoT Operations: Guided by Information Theory, the IMTPS compression module achieves provably efficient semantic-preserving compression, drastically reducing data storage and energy costs. Trustworthy Data Extraction: A Game Theory-based adversarial verification network ensures high reliability in extracting critical information, mitigating the risk of model hallucination in high-stakes citizen services. Robust Multimodal Fusion: The fusion engine leverages Causal Inference to distinguish true causality from spurious correlations, enabling trustworthy integration of complex, multi-source urban data. Adaptive Intelligent System: A Meta-Learning-based retrieval mechanism allows the system to rapidly adapt to new and evolving query patterns, ensuring long-term effectiveness in dynamic urban environments. We validate IMTPS on a large-scale, publicly released benchmark dataset of 14,230 multimodal records. IMTPS demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving a 96.9% reduction in storage footprint and a 47% decrease in critical data extraction errors. By open-sourcing our implementation, we aim to provide a replicable blueprint for building the next generation of trustworthy and sustainable AI-IoT systems for citizen-centric smart cities.

The article consists in an in-depth interpretative study of Smart City in the case of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, China. It proposes a framework of analysis as a heuristic tool to interpret narratives in general and those of Smart City Hong Kong in particular. The capacity of a narrative to confer meaning draws upon three criteria: its originality (degree of endogeneity); its sincerity (internal validity and trustworthiness), and its extension (its ability to provide a convincing account to the outside world for social phenomena). They are also affected by the form of diffusion and communication. Four types of account emerged from our empirical investigation: survey responses; written responses from official agencies; face to face interviews; and collective interviews in focus groups. By reconstituting chains of meaning in relation to the Smart City, the article interrogates the utility of technology, sustainability and e-governance narratives for public administration. Taken as a whole, Smart City appears as a rather hollow narrative, an empty signifier, a general term lacking clear meaning.

This study examines the paradox in Jakarta’s smart city governance through the case of Citayam Fashion Week (CFW), a grassroots urban phenomenon initiated by digital-native youth. While urban digital transformation is intended to promote inclusivity and innovation, the inconsistent responses from local authorities reflect governance fragmentation, hindering the organic development of creative digital communities. Using qualitative analysis of secondary data, including online reports and academic sources, the study reveals that government policies often fail to integrate cultural and social dimensions into smart city frameworks. The findings emphasize the need for more adaptive, participatory governance models that acknowledge the evolving digital landscape. This research contributes to discussions on smart city governance, digital youth participation, and urban policy adaptation in a global context.

Globally, cities are emerging into Smart Cities (SC) as a result of sustainable cities and the adaption of recent Internet of Things (IoT) technology. It is becoming essential to involve students in sustainability as engineering and technology are crucial elements in fixing the past adverse effects on our globe. Engineering e-learners are being educated on the sustainable development of SC in many Smart e-learning Tools (SeT) and infrastructure faculties around the world, especially in developing Asian countries such as India. This research paper presents an advanced solution for interactive Smart Learning Environment (SLE) systems based on new IoT technologies in the Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) found in Smart Learning Environments (SLE) for SC people. The proposed IoT-Ve-LS system provides an optimized solution for online classes to attend classes using VR/AR glasses to feel the interactions between Smart Digital Devices (SDD) as practically as in practice. The new Virtual e-Learning System (Ve-LS) is experimental, allows automatic Information and Communications Technology (ICT) development, and offers an extraordinary SLE for increased global recognition. This paper focuses on IoT-Ve-LS, a tool for SLE. The IoT-Ve-LS domain has been fast-growing through the emerging technological trends of the IoT. The IoT-Ve-LS method used in the design and implementation allows flexible usage and integration of the online courses by SLE. The impacts of empirical E-learning evaluation on implementing IoT techniques in online tutoring have been analysed to find out its research hypothesis. Our IoT-sensor-based Reservoir Computing allows the classification of short-term learning language sentences relatively quickly, highlighting the minimal training time and optimized solution of real-time cases for controlling temporal and sequential signals at the cloud computing level. The triangulation analysis in information gathering endorses the theoretical models that use computable and personalized approaches.

Purpose This study aims to discuss the transformational effect of the smart governance concept, which is one of the complementary elements of the smart city concept and to explain the change in governance structures according to the developments in information and communication technology. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the case study as one of the qualitative research methods is preferred, and smart city models of Barcelona, Amsterdam, Kocaeli and Ankara are examined. Findings In the research, scientific studies in the academic literature were evaluated according to the content analysis, and as a result of this analysis, the cities examined were grouped as “beginner,” “medium” and “advanced.” In the group, the characteristics of smart cities and the services they offer were taken into account. In this context, smart governance methods and their transformational effects are analyzed. Originality/value The most important contribution of this study to the literature is to identify the important characteristics of developed and successful smart city initiatives and to encourage their application to other developing world cities as a best practices model.

Megacities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) are facing severe challenges and unbalanced development. Combating megacity syndrome is crucial for achieving modernization. This study developed a Development-Autonomy-Inclusiveness governance framework to characterize megacity governance capacity modernization (MGCM). The integrated model is employed to evaluate the MGCM for nine megacities along the YREB in China from 2013 to 2022. The key determinants are identified by Geo-detector. The configuration pathways and synergistic mechanisms for high MGCM are depicted using fsQCA. The empirical study indicates that: (1) The MGCM is at a low level but displays a slight upward trend, with development capacity > autonomy capacity > inclusiveness capacity. The MGCMs of three urban agglomerations manifest as being development-driven, autonomy-constrained, and autonomy-promoted. (2) The synergistic interaction among determinants is greater than any single factor. (3) Megacities exhibited distinct pathways to achieve high MGCM: tri-capacity synergy pattern in the Yangtze River Delta, development dominant pattern in Chengdu-Chongqing, autonomy weakness pattern in the Mid-Yangtze River, and adversity survival pattern during extraordinary periods. A novel theoretical framework and practical examples are proposed for boosting the modernization of governance capacity in China’s megacities, offering valuable insights for advancing the governance modernization of megacities worldwide.

This study developed a strategic framework for electronic waste management in Tehran, Iran’s capital megacity, by integrating SWOT analysis with the Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM). Insights were obtained from a balanced panel of 30 local stakeholders: 15 public-sector officials from Tehran’s Waste Management Organization and 15 managers of private recycling facilities. The QSPM analysis was then employed to prioritize the strategies, identifying six key approaches. The formulation of comprehensive health, safety, and environmental (HSE) regulations for e-waste recycling emerged as the top-priority strategy (Total Attractiveness Score (TAS) = 12.418). Subsequent priorities included optimizing e-waste collection processes (TAS = 10.764) and establishing dedicated e-waste sorting centers (TAS = 10.66). Sensitivity analysis confirmed the stability of this ranking against variations in key factor weights. The study identified significant gaps in supervision, infrastructure, and technical expertise, while also recognizing opportunities presented by Tehran’s high population density and the availability of advanced technologies. To our knowledge, this work represents the first application of an integrated SWOT–QSPM framework to Tehran’s e-waste challenge, offering a novel and replicable model for megacities facing comparable governance complexity and public–private integration barriers. The proposed framework provides municipal policymakers with a practical roadmap, indicating that the integrated SWOT-QSPM approach effectively generates tailored waste management strategies for megacities.