Smart cities on the path to net zero through technology governance and equity in advancing SDG 11

Cities are central to delivering United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (sustainable cities and communities), and net-zero commitments increasingly shape how urban buildings, energy systems, mobility, and governance are researched and planned. This study maps how peer-reviewed research at the intersection of smart cities and net-zero transitions is thematically structured, how these themes align with SDG 11 and interconnected SDGs, and which dimensions of SDG 11 remain underrepresented. Applying PRISMA-based selection and BERTopic topic modeling with expert validation to 244 publications, the analysis identifies four dominant clusters: green buildings and sustainable architecture, renewable energy and urban decarbonization, sustainable mobility and transport, and urban governance and policy. The corpus links SDG 11 most strongly to SDG 13 (climate action), an expected consequence of the search design, SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy), and SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), while SDG 10 (reduced inequalities) and SDG 17 (partnerships for the goals) co-occur only rarely. A central but bounded finding is an equity measurement gap: the screen identified four of the 244 studies that directly examine distributional outcomes or the experiences of marginalized populations, a result that characterizes the decarbonization-framed literature this review samples rather than SDG 11 research as a whole. This is a lower-bound count, since titles were screened across the full corpus but abstracts only for the 32 representative publications, which were selected by topic probability and expert judgement rather than at random. Affordability, accessibility, participation, and inclusiveness function largely as normative references rather than measured outcomes. Coding of the abstracts of the 32 studies examined in detail shows that 19 report substantive implementation failures, concerning finance, institutions, regulation, or technology, yet none reports a downside falling unevenly on identified population groups; within this subset, failure is framed institutionally rather than socially. Fragmented institutions, financing gaps, and uneven adoption (particularly in the global south) constrain scalability. Cities should therefore embed smart technologies within long-term policy frameworks rather than pilots, coordinate buildings, energy, mobility, and governance as one system, and build distributional indicators into evaluation. An Antecedents–Decisions–Outcomes agenda directs future research toward group-disaggregated, longitudinal, and causal evidence for equity-centered urban transitions.