Systemic Governance in Smart Cities: Rethinking Urban Complexity

Dear Colleagues,

Systemic transformations in digital infrastructures, and the rapid diffusion of data-driven technologies (Tallberg et al., 2023), urban data platforms (Wolf et al., 2025), and intelligent city infrastructures (Azevedo Guedes et al., 2018; Bittencourt et al., 2025) are redefining the foundations of contemporary smart cities. Information technologies have progressively entered every environment and sphere of daily activity, to the point that the notion of a “pervasive society” (Virtanen & Kaivo-oja, 2015) has emerged—one in which citizens, firms and public organizations  are all constantly and increasingly embedded (“ubiquitous governance”).

These developments place private actors and public institutions within complex environments where data operate as political, social, and economic resources (Wong et al., 2024), mediating interactions across organizational and sectoral boundaries (Ruijer, 2021) and reshaping how public governance and public value are conceived (Moore, 1995; Löfgren & Webster, 2020; El-Sayed et al., 2025).

Technological and sustainability pressures (UN, 2015) are also transforming the material dimension of cities. Intelligent building management systems, once centred on basic automation, now function as networks of adaptive and data-responsive components (Magaletti et al., 2025). This evolution reflects a broader shift: smart cities behave as complex socio-technical systems, where infrastructures, digital architectures, institutional routines, and citizen behaviour form tightly interconnected environments.

Although the literature is substantial, many studies examine these changes through separate analytical lenses—focusing on individual technologies, policy tools, or organizational dynamics. Less attention has been devoted to how these elements interact within larger urban systems, where interdependencies, feedback processes, and non-linear effects shape outcomes. A systems perspective offers a way to examine these relationships and to understand how coordination, resilience, and public value emerge across multiple domains.

The capacity of public bodies to respond to societal needs or to plan beyond the short term increasingly relies on practices grounded in the systematic interpretation of data rather than on fixed normative positions (Lee, 2020). Data influence how problems are defined, how interventions are evaluated, and how citizens participate in and scrutinize decision-making (Micheli et al., 2020; Pavone et al., 2024; El-Sayed et al., 2025). As data circulate, they reorganize information flows and alter the linkages among administrative, technological, and civic systems.

Processes of datafication are also reshaping governance in peripheral and underserved neighbourhoods (Hatuka, 2024). From a systemic standpoint, these areas cannot be understood solely as sites of vulnerability; they function as nodes within wider urban systems, where local dynamics influence—and are influenced by—citywide transformations. Locally grounded and co-produced data initiatives generate information that feeds back into broader decision processes, helping recalibrate the distribution of services, opportunities, and rights. Such interventions do not simply address disparities but modify the system’s internal balances, contributing to more coherent and equitable patterns of urban development (Wang et al., 2021; Zou et al., 2023).

Research in urban governance (Pierre & Peters, 2012; Meijer, 2018) further shows that data do not act as neutral supports for administrative routines; they actively reconfigure governance architectures. As information moves across agencies, private platforms, infrastructures, and civic groups, organizational boundaries become more permeable and coordination increasingly contingent on how actors adjust within shifting configurations. The interplay among state, market, and civil society is redefined as different forms of expertise, authority, and interest intersect. These dynamics surface in the practical politics of producing, managing, and interpreting data. In light of this, smart city governance appears less as a predefined model and more as a set of evolving socio-technical arrangements shaped through continuous interactions and feedback among interconnected subsystems.

The challenge is to establish legitimate, accountable, and coherent ways of governing these evolving configurations, by discussing systemic governance challenges in a more inclusive and demand-oriented manner.

For this Special Issue, we seek contributions that examine how urban data ecosystems, digital infrastructures, and socio-technical interactions reframe governance and reshape collective decision-making oriented toward the co-creation of public value.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Systemic approaches to smart city governance, policy formulation, and institutional design;
• Interdependencies across public institutions, digital platforms, and urban infrastructures;
• Feedback dynamics, emergent properties, and adaptive learning within urban systems;
• Data governance, ethical considerations, and public value creation in data-intensive environments;
• Governance of peripheral neighbourhoods and the system-wide implications of localized interventions;
• Multi-level coordination and cross-boundary governance in complex urban settings;
• Systems modelling, simulation, and computational techniques for supporting urban policy;
• Organizational, institutional, and community capabilities that enable system-wide innovation and resilience;
• Intersections among sustainability transitions, intelligent building systems, and urban governance;
• Systemic accountability frameworks in smart cities, examining how data flows, algorithmic processes, institutional arrangements, and civic participation reshape responsibilities, transparency, and oversight across interconnected urban subsystems.

We encourage contributions that advance knowledge on systemic governance in smart cities and examine its systemic interdependencies across the STEEPV spheres: social, technological, economic, environmental, political, and value systems.

Dr. Pietro Pavone
Prof. Dr. Roberto Mavilia
Guest Editors

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• urban and suburban governance
• socio-technical systems
• modern systems theory
• adaptive complex system theory
• complexity theory
• data governance
• systems governance and systemic governance
• smart city and city management
• smart building management
• intelligent accountability and data-driven accountability
• data sharing and data-driven public value
• collaborative governance