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Why Smart Cities Fail: An Innovation Management Diagnosis of Urban Digital Governance
A diagnostic review reveals that smart city governance theory suffers from deep theoretical weaknesses β and innovation management research may hold the prescriptions.
By Sean K.S. Shin
This blog summarizes research trends based on published paper abstracts. Specific numbers or findings may contain inaccuracies. For scholarly rigor, always consult the original papers cited in each post.
Barcelona spent over a decade building one of Europe's most ambitious smart city platforms β sensor-laden streets, open data portals, participatory budgeting tools β only to see successive administrations dismantle and rebuild the governance architecture from scratch. The pattern is not unique. From Songdo's ghost-town aesthetics to Sidewalk Toronto's spectacular collapse, the smart city movement has produced a catalogue of governance failures that no amount of fiber optic cable can fix.
The question is no longer whether smart cities can be built. The question is why their governance frameworks keep breaking.
The Research Landscape
Smart city development (SCD) has attracted enormous scholarly attention over the past decade. Hundreds of frameworks, maturity models, and governance blueprints have been proposed. Yet the field remains theoretically fragmented. Urban planners draw on one set of assumptions; information systems scholars draw on another; public administration researchers on a third. The result is a governance literature that is wide but shallow β rich in prescriptions, poor in theoretical grounding.
Beckers and Mora (2025), writing in the Journal of Urban Technology, step into this gap with a deliberately diagnostic posture. Rather than proposing yet another framework, they ask a more uncomfortable question: what are the theoretical weaknesses embedded in how we conceptualize smart city governance in the first place?
Their answer draws from an unexpected source. The authors introduce innovation management research as a theoretical resource β arguing that the challenges of governing smart city development share deep structural similarities with the challenges of governing innovation processes in organizations and ecosystems.
Critical Analysis
The core argument is that SCD governance theory suffers from identifiable weaknesses that innovation management scholarship is equipped to address. The authors provide prescriptions across four dimensions.
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| Claim | Source | Confidence | Hedge |
|---|
| SCD governance theory contains identifiable theoretical weaknesses | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | ModerateβHigh | The authors diagnose these weaknesses through their analytical lens |
| Innovation management research offers theoretical resources to address these weaknesses | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | Moderate | The authors argue this constitutes a viable corrective |
| Prescriptions are offered for governance conceptualization | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | Moderate | Prescriptive, not yet empirically validated |
| Prescriptions extend to urban strategy formulation, monitoring indicator design, and multi-level governance dynamics | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | Moderate | Scope of prescriptions as described by the authors |
What makes this contribution distinctive is its refusal to treat smart city governance as a purely urban phenomenon. By reframing SCD as an innovation management challenge, Beckers and Mora open a channel between two literatures that have developed largely in isolation. Innovation management has spent decades grappling with how organizations navigate uncertainty, coordinate distributed actors, and balance exploration against exploitation. These are precisely the dynamics that smart city governance must handle β but rarely theorizes explicitly.
The prescription for multi-level governance dynamics appears particularly promising. Smart cities operate across municipal, regional, national, and increasingly supranational scales. Innovation management research on ecosystem governance and platform dynamics may offer conceptual tools that traditional urban governance theory lacks.
However, a critical reader should note what is not yet demonstrated. The prescriptions the authors offer β for governance conceptualization, strategy formulation, monitoring indicators, and multi-level dynamics β remain at the conceptual stage. Whether innovation management frameworks translate cleanly to the political, institutional, and spatial complexities of actual cities is an empirical question that this paper opens rather than answers.
There is also a selection risk in the theoretical bridging itself. Innovation management is a broad field with its own internal debates and paradigm tensions. Which strands of innovation management are imported β and which are left behind β will shape the resulting governance theory in ways that deserve scrutiny.
Open Questions
Empirical validation gap. The prescriptions are conceptual. How do they perform when tested against actual smart city governance failures β Barcelona, Songdo, Toronto? Case-based validation appears to be a necessary next step.Political economy blind spots. Innovation management research has historically focused on firms and markets. Can its frameworks adequately capture the power dynamics, democratic accountability requirements, and distributional conflicts that characterize urban governance?Scalability of prescriptions. The monitoring indicator design prescription raises a practical question: who designs the indicators, who measures them, and who is held accountable? Innovation management may offer design principles, but institutional embedding requires political negotiation.Global South applicability. Most smart city governance literature draws on cases from Europe, East Asia, and North America. Whether innovation management prescriptions apply to cities in the Global South β where institutional capacity and infrastructure contexts differ radically β remains unexplored.Temporal dynamics. Smart city governance is not static. Political administrations change, technologies evolve, citizen expectations shift. How do innovation management prescriptions account for governance frameworks that must adapt over decades, not product cycles?Closing
Beckers and Mora's contribution is less a solution than a diagnosis β and that may be exactly what the field needs. The smart city literature has not lacked for governance frameworks. It has lacked for theoretical self-awareness about why those frameworks keep failing. By importing the conceptual vocabulary of innovation management, the authors offer a mirror in which SCD governance theory can see its own blind spots.
The real test will be whether this diagnosis leads to treatments that survive contact with the messy, political, path-dependent realities of actual cities. For now, the prescription is on the table. The clinical trials have yet to begin.
Barcelona spent over a decade building one of Europe's most ambitious smart city platforms β sensor-laden streets, open data portals, participatory budgeting tools β only to see successive administrations dismantle and rebuild the governance architecture from scratch. The pattern is not unique. From Songdo's ghost-town aesthetics to Sidewalk Toronto's spectacular collapse, the smart city movement has produced a catalogue of governance failures that no amount of fiber optic cable can fix.
The question is no longer whether smart cities can be built. The question is why their governance frameworks keep breaking.
The Research Landscape
Smart city development (SCD) has attracted enormous scholarly attention over the past decade. Hundreds of frameworks, maturity models, and governance blueprints have been proposed. Yet the field remains theoretically fragmented. Urban planners draw on one set of assumptions; information systems scholars draw on another; public administration researchers on a third. The result is a governance literature that is wide but shallow β rich in prescriptions, poor in theoretical grounding.
Beckers and Mora (2025), writing in the Journal of Urban Technology, step into this gap with a deliberately diagnostic posture. Rather than proposing yet another framework, they ask a more uncomfortable question: what are the theoretical weaknesses embedded in how we conceptualize smart city governance in the first place?
Their answer draws from an unexpected source. The authors introduce innovation management research as a theoretical resource β arguing that the challenges of governing smart city development share deep structural similarities with the challenges of governing innovation processes in organizations and ecosystems.
Critical Analysis
The core argument is that SCD governance theory suffers from identifiable weaknesses that innovation management scholarship is equipped to address. The authors provide prescriptions across four dimensions.
<
| Claim | Source | Confidence | Hedge |
|---|
| SCD governance theory contains identifiable theoretical weaknesses | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | ModerateβHigh | The authors diagnose these weaknesses through their analytical lens |
| Innovation management research offers theoretical resources to address these weaknesses | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | Moderate | The authors argue this constitutes a viable corrective |
| Prescriptions are offered for governance conceptualization | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | Moderate | Prescriptive, not yet empirically validated |
| Prescriptions extend to urban strategy formulation, monitoring indicator design, and multi-level governance dynamics | Beckers & Mora, 2025 (abstract) | Moderate | Scope of prescriptions as described by the authors |
What makes this contribution distinctive is its refusal to treat smart city governance as a purely urban phenomenon. By reframing SCD as an innovation management challenge, Beckers and Mora open a channel between two literatures that have developed largely in isolation. Innovation management has spent decades grappling with how organizations navigate uncertainty, coordinate distributed actors, and balance exploration against exploitation. These are precisely the dynamics that smart city governance must handle β but rarely theorizes explicitly.
The prescription for multi-level governance dynamics appears particularly promising. Smart cities operate across municipal, regional, national, and increasingly supranational scales. Innovation management research on ecosystem governance and platform dynamics may offer conceptual tools that traditional urban governance theory lacks.
However, a critical reader should note what is not yet demonstrated. The prescriptions the authors offer β for governance conceptualization, strategy formulation, monitoring indicators, and multi-level dynamics β remain at the conceptual stage. Whether innovation management frameworks translate cleanly to the political, institutional, and spatial complexities of actual cities is an empirical question that this paper opens rather than answers.
There is also a selection risk in the theoretical bridging itself. Innovation management is a broad field with its own internal debates and paradigm tensions. Which strands of innovation management are imported β and which are left behind β will shape the resulting governance theory in ways that deserve scrutiny.
Open Questions
Empirical validation gap. The prescriptions are conceptual. How do they perform when tested against actual smart city governance failures β Barcelona, Songdo, Toronto? Case-based validation appears to be a necessary next step.Political economy blind spots. Innovation management research has historically focused on firms and markets. Can its frameworks adequately capture the power dynamics, democratic accountability requirements, and distributional conflicts that characterize urban governance?Scalability of prescriptions. The monitoring indicator design prescription raises a practical question: who designs the indicators, who measures them, and who is held accountable? Innovation management may offer design principles, but institutional embedding requires political negotiation.Global South applicability. Most smart city governance literature draws on cases from Europe, East Asia, and North America. Whether innovation management prescriptions apply to cities in the Global South β where institutional capacity and infrastructure contexts differ radically β remains unexplored.Temporal dynamics. Smart city governance is not static. Political administrations change, technologies evolve, citizen expectations shift. How do innovation management prescriptions account for governance frameworks that must adapt over decades, not product cycles?Closing
Beckers and Mora's contribution is less a solution than a diagnosis β and that may be exactly what the field needs. The smart city literature has not lacked for governance frameworks. It has lacked for theoretical self-awareness about why those frameworks keep failing. By importing the conceptual vocabulary of innovation management, the authors offer a mirror in which SCD governance theory can see its own blind spots.
The real test will be whether this diagnosis leads to treatments that survive contact with the messy, political, path-dependent realities of actual cities. For now, the prescription is on the table. The clinical trials have yet to begin.
References (2)
Beckers, D. & Mora, L. (2025). [Title of article]. Journal of Urban Technology.
Beckers, D., & Mora, L. (2025). Overcoming the Smart City Governance Challenge: An Innovation Management Perspective. Journal of Urban Technology, 32(2), 85-106.