Motivations for smart cities differ between Africa, Europe, and Asia

Smart cities are understood in literature and among municipal actors as a way forward to better organize and manage cities. However, the underlying motivations behind smart city development diverge substantially across regions, and their implications for governance capacity and urban energy transitions remain insufficiently explored. Here, we combine NLP-based discourse analysis with implementation-oriented triangulation to examine smart city motivations and their relationship with urban energy transitions across 15 selected cities in Asia, Europe, and Africa, including six in-depth case studies: Hangzhou, Singapore, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. The findings illustrate three broad smart city trajectories: technology-driven, climate-oriented, and need-based pathways. The sampled Asian cities more strongly aligned with digital optimization, the selected European cases with low-carbon infrastructure integration and climate governance, and the sampled African cases with infrastructure expansion and basic service provision. The findings further suggest that interactions between smart city technologies and urban energy systems vary across differing governance and infrastructural contexts.