Cities around the world have embrace the "smart city" and launched initiatives to place people amid evolving piecemeal strategies. Central to such smart-city programs are digitization and developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which are part of "hard" approaches in a dichotomist framework. Among such approaches are ICT applications as well as physical infrastructure, whereas soft approaches point to innovation, education, culture, social inclusion, and governance. Respectively, they represent a discursive dichotomy referred to as technical or social parts of an integrated (systems) approach.

The binary nature of unintegrated approaches forces pathway choices in smart city development. These can be framed as sectors frequently employed to encapsulate the smart city (e.g., fragmented into people, living, economy, government, environment, mobility). However, this dichotomy of technology versus society is becoming increasingly difficult to practice and can pose an epistemological obstruction to smart city development, both conceptually and practically. Ultimately, technical approaches will need to be justified based on their societal purpose in expensive real-world applications. This lends to a broader and varied engagement with smart cities necessarily involving stakeholders, participation, citizens, and soft/ social aspects. More realistically is a complex systems approach that integrates socioeconomic, environmental, cultural, and political subsystems within a sustainability framework.