For nearly a decade, Smart City was the most overused phrase in urban technology. Billions were spent, dashboards were built, command-and-control rooms were inaugurated—and yet, outside a few showcase pilots, cities are not meaningfully “smarter” today than they were in 2015.
This wasn’t a failure of technology. It was a failure of governance logic.
The Core Mistake: Vendor-Driven Cities
Most Smart City programs followed the same pattern:
- A central government announces a flagship initiative
- Large vendors pitch integrated platforms
- Cities buy sensors, dashboards, and control rooms
- Pilots launch, press releases follow
- Systems stagnate, scale never arrives
The common thread?
Technology decisions were made before governance decisions.
Vendors defined:
- What problems mattered
- What data should be collected
- What “success” looked like
City leadership mostly played the role of sponsor, not owner.
Urban systems, however, don’t fail because of missing dashboards. They fail because of institutional friction—fragmented departments, unclear accountability, weak operating incentives, and misaligned budgets.
Smart Cities tried to digitize outputs without fixing decision rights.
Why Pilots Looked Successful (and Weren’t)?
Smart City pilots often worked precisely because they were small, protected, and artificial.
- Couple of wards
- Couple of departments
- Fewer use cases
- One enthusiastic officer
These pilots bypassed real-world constraints:
- Inter-departmental politics
- Procurement rigidity
- O&M funding cycles
- Workforce capacity
- Legal and regulatory limits
Scaling reintroduced all the complexity the pilot had temporarily escaped. The result was predictable:
Technology that functioned—but institutions that didn’t.
The Myth of the Integrated City Platform
Another fatal assumption was that cities could be run like enterprises. Enterprise software works because:
- Authority is centralized
- Objectives are singular (profit, efficiency)
- Incentives are aligned
Cities are the opposite:
- Authority is distributed
- Objectives conflict (equity, growth, resilience, politics)
- Incentives are misaligned by design
Trying to “integrate” a city through a monolithic platform ignored how cities actually operate—as negotiated systems, not optimized machines.
What Will Replace Smart Cities
The post–Smart City era is already taking shape, quietly and unevenly. It has three defining characteristics.
1. Governance-First Digitalization
Instead of asking “What technology should we deploy?”
Cities are beginning to ask “Who decides, who pays, who maintains?”
Digital systems are being designed after clarifying:
- Jurisdictional authority
- Data ownership
- Operating responsibility
- Long-term funding
This reverses the Smart City logic—and fixes its biggest flaw.
2. Domain-Led Modernization, Not City-Wide Fantasies
Successful initiatives today are narrow, boring, and deeply operational:
- Utility billing and grid reliability
- Transit scheduling and fare integration
- Water loss reduction
- Waste collection optimization
These systems matter because they:
- Sit inside existing institutions
- Have clear owners
- Directly affect daily outcomes
No grand “city dashboard.” Just systems that actually get used.
3. Digital Public Infrastructure, Not Vendor Platforms
The most important shift is philosophical. Cities are moving—slowly—towards digital public infrastructure:
- Open standards
- Interoperable systems
- Modular procurement
- Vendor replaceability
This doesn’t eliminate vendors. It demotes them—from city architects to component suppliers.
That change alone explains why the Smart City era had to end.
The Deeper Lesson
Smart Cities failed because they assumed:
Better data would automatically produce better decisions.
Reality taught us the opposite:
Better decisions require better institutions first.
Technology amplifies governance. It cannot substitute for it.
The cities that succeed in the next decade won’t call themselves “smart.”
They’ll be:
- More accountable
- More modular
- More boring—and more effective
And that is precisely the point.
Post–Smart City thinking isn’t anti-technology. It’s anti-illusion.