Revisiting “smart” cities: Towards bridging a territorial divide through an integrated approach

This study challenges how the “smart” city branding implicitly introduces a spatial preconception – positioning the city as the primary, if not exclusive, territorial unit for harnessing smart technologies. This biased framing inherently undermines “rural areas” and “remote regions”, despite their integral role within sustainable territorial planning, thus, limiting their potential to leverage smart technologies to strengthen territorial inclusiveness and resilience. Contrary to this inherent sense of seeming “biasness”, and through a holistic territorial perspective, this manuscript attempts to critically interrogate this implicit bias underscoring the assumption that cities are the most legitimate, if not the only, entities suited for a given “smart” transformation. It also defies the contemporary narrative, in both scholarship and practice, that equates smart innovation and resilience-building exclusively within urban contexts. By doing so, the study questions a long-standing trend within smart city discourse to confine the benefits of technological advancement within cities only, rather than considering the full territorial landscape. In addition, this paper sheds light on the new role of rapid technological innovations that would shift the paradigm of sustainable territorial development, embracing a more integrated and inclusive approach seeking to improve the well-being of human settlements across the globe regardless of being rural, remote regions or urban. • Portrays how smart frameworks favor cities, reinforcing urban bias in smart technology adoption. • Focuses how rural and remote areas are marginalized, limiting smart innovation and resilience. • Advocates an integrated territorial approach, challenging the notion that smart transformation is intrinsically urban. • Emphasizes technology’s role in inclusive welfare across urban, rural, and remote regions – a paradigm shift in territorial development.