The roles of institutional trust and spatial justice in the resilient smart mobility systems

Abstract Smart city narratives often conflate technological optimization with urban resilience, promising seamless mobility through Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) and algorithmic management. However, this technocentric focus frequently obscures the invisible infrastructure of social systems required to sustain these technologies. This conceptual paper posits that without addressing deep-seated socio-spatial inequalities, smart infrastructures remain fragile and prone to public rejection, not due to technical failure, but social disconnect. We propose the Just Smart Mobility Model (JSMM), a novel theoretical framework bridging Mobility Justice with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Unlike traditional adoption models, the JSMM redefines urban safety to encompass protection from algorithmic bias and spatial marginalization, identifying Institutional Trust as the critical mediator between infrastructural neglect and user adoption. To ground these theoretical abstractions in contested urban reality, we operationalize the framework through a forensic spatial vignette of the Iskandar Rapid Transit (IRT) in Malaysia. Rather than a statistical validation, this analysis functions as a structural stress-test, revealing how historical planning decisions that bypassed low-socioeconomic communities have fostered a trust deficit. The findings illustrate how digital exclusion acts as a fundamental safety risk, effectively ‘redlining’ vulnerable groups from the smart city grid. The paper concludes by advocating for a governance shift from technical solutionism to restorative justice, ensuring mobility systems are not only efficient but sufficiently inclusive to be resilient.