Smart City Governance through Big Data: Transformation towards Sustainability

Smart city governance (SCG) is a new paradigm of urban policy, planning, and management that able to solve emerging challenges of urban areas along with ensuring urban sustainability. Data-driven technology provides an opportunity to transform the conventional practices into smart practices at all levels of urban actors. This study assesses the suitability of big data approaches for ensuring SCG. A systematic desk review has been conducted under the framework of PRISMA. This study reveals a difference among the opinions of scholars on SCG, such as, a group of scholars emphasizes on smart characteristics of technology, people, and their integration, while other group focuses on the digital transformation of urban management practices of key actors like public, private and community. This study argues that SCG is a combined function of public, private, and community that adapted advanced technology like big data in their practices for transformation from conventional one for ensuring urban sustainability. This study offers a number of indicators for the concerned authorities to understand the SCG and take priority-based decisions from systemic data and information.