1. Introduction

The Cidea of the “smart city” is bringing a number of key and disruptive innovations into the operation of urban life, affecting social dynamics, governance, and markets. Developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) make it possible to digitally connect myriads of devices, sensors, actuators, and smartphones and to simultaneously collect Big Data for analyzing, managing, and controlling the ever-increasing number of aspects of urban life. The uninterrupted high-resolution flow of users’ data, real-time responses to it, and the customies 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 of services to tailor people’s individual needs, desires, and trajectories bring the promise of combined efficiency, integration, transparency, inclusiveness, and participation. and developments in Information and Conseqmmuently, many cities around the world have launched smart city initiatives, often supported by strategic city-level programs. Discursively, these strategies “place people at the center.” Meanwhile, at the core of the emergence of the smart city remain digitalization and ICT. This has produced thenication Technologies (ICT), which are part of "hard" approaches in a dichotomist expression of “hard” and “soft”framework. Among such approaches to the smart city (e.g.,are ^[1][2]), where “hard” refers to ICT-centered applications ands well as physical infrastructures such as buildings, energy grids, natural resources, water and waste management, mobility, and logistics, while “soft”, whereas soft approaches points to innovations, education, culture, social inclusion, and governance. This Respectively, they represent a discursive dichotomy of “hard” and “soft” may also appear in other forms such as “referred to as technical” or “ or social” or as part parts of an integrated (systems) approach ^[3]. The binary of nathe hard and soft is also often presented as a choice of pathways in the development of smart cities. It has become rare that a smart city vision does not include a form of a pie diagram plotting a circle in the middle that reads “sure of unintegrated approaches forces pathway choices in smart city” and is surrounded by sectors for “smart people”, “smart living”, “smart economy”, “smart government”, “smart environment”, and “smart mobility” and their variations. This is supposed to demonstrate an integrated approach, where inevitably, the “soft” approach dominates. However, it is often the case that soft domains are emphasized in a discursive way to justify the rationale for the deployment of smart cities, but that specific areas of real-life smart city application shift the emphasis back to the hard domains such as dataization, its enabling infrastructure, and the deployment of various ICT-based technological solutions. Acknowledging this as a strategy to promulgate technological and instrumentalist agendas in the name of social agendas and citizen empowerment ^[4] development. These can be framed as sectors frequently employed to encapsulate the smart city (e.g., fragmented into people, we, nevertheless, argue that this is more than a discursive diversion. What is happening is rather symptomatic of the ever-deepening interpenetration and hybridization of technicaliving, economy, governance, and sociocultural elements in an increasingly digitalized society, where thement, environment, mobility). However, this dichotomy of technology versus society is inbecoming increasingly difficult to sustain in practice and, indeed, becomes can pose an epistemological obstruction to addressing the ssmart city as an analytical category.

2. The Politics of Hard/Soft Dichotomies

Hard adevelopmend soft approaches to smart cities have been a common language in academic and policy literature, lending to the origin of the smart city concept itself, with the original technocratic focus now increasingly reframed as “citizen-centric” (i.e., ^[4]). With ICT , both conceptually and practically. Ultimately, technical approaches will need to being central to the smart city, the concept has also drawn from other “hard” sectors such as low-energy buildings, transportation systems, or automation (cf. ^[5][6][7]). Howjustified based on their societal purpose in evxper, the smart city has quickly developed a dialogue with longer-standing principles of sustainable cities ^[8]nsive real-world applications. This leands to a broader and varied engagement with smart cities, now necessarily involving the notions of multiple ststakeholders, participation, citizens, and other soft/soft/ social aspects ^[9]. LMoretaifa ^[10], for example, discusses the importance of approaching smart cities asalistically is a complex innovation ecosystems withapproach that integrateds socioeconomic, ecologicnvironmental, cultural, and political sub-systems while adoptingithin a sustainability approachframework. NAmid this, thevertheless,re remain political tensions between the hhard and soft pathways to the smart city remain. Many authors are cautious about iachieving the smart city. Imbalances when the smart cityexist in agenda iss that are dominated by digital technology. They question whether so-called smart solutions are all about a technolog, with technical push drivenes by high-tech corporations (e.g., ^{[11][12][13][14]}). This briangsd forth the entrepreneurial stimulation of smart development by the ICT industries and markets associated with their products and services ^[15][16]. Discursively at least, cCitizen engagement and the idea that technology is needs to be leveraged to achievewith greater social, environmental, and economic—or overall sustainability—needs become the inputs as its currency of the smart city. Cities such as Barcelona have adopted an integrated architecture based on sensors, code, and the Internet—all in the name of developing networked habitats and distributive management as part of a “multi-like Barcelona are multiscalar city”and empowering itstheir citizens ^[17]. Admiring Barcelona’s recent attempt to re-envisage the smart city around “technological sovereignty” and the notion that teplaces where technology should be is oriented to serve local residents as technology “commons”, Refs. ^[4][18] argue that elsewhere “cAvoitdizen-centric” roles are narrowly based on predefined choices over market-led solutions (citizens as users or consumers), and not so much in proactive social innovation or political citizenship. They ^[18] also arng top-down approaches to smart city development could promote inclusiveness (e.gue., that this approach is common for EU institutions, and, despite all the “citizen-focused” discourse, smart urbanism remains rooted in instrumental and paternalistic practices. Manycommunity-led initiatives) authors have similarly questioned the extent of inclusiveness of smart interventions regardless of their capacityd help to boost sustainability and spurwhile spurring economic growth in cities. Some call the smart city a “hollow signifier” built upon elitist control that only renders further exclusions and injustices, triggering, although not through commodification amid a weak economy ^[19][20]. This perspective considers smart city solutions as neoliberal “te techno-environmental fixes” t. Thatus, involve the depoliticization of city governance and the outsourcing of public services to money-grabbing initiatives by technology funders, utilitysocial responsibility, politics, and ICT companies ^[14][17][21]. Whaet emerges here is key to the issue oics of governance. If the “soft” strategy is chosen, sustaining it in practice may be problematic given the strong impulses for marketization via digitalization more aligned with the “hard” strategy offered by technology proponents. Yet, an ing technological hardware and infrastructure and software become important extension from that is the delibeconsideration of whether it is still meaningful to make the dichotomist distinction between the “hard” and “soft” domains or whether it is necessary to accept their co-production (if not blurred meanings). That would require acknowledging both the changing nature (digitalization) of society and the political nature of technology and, consequently, the social responsibility, politics, and ethics of governing technological hardware, software, and other infrastructure. The multifaceted nature s in a multifaceted (inclusive) approach. A systems thinking approach - rather than other-replacing - is relevant tof smart cities, therefore, necessitates a different approach that is more in line with systems thinking, where hard and soft domains are co-occurrent and combined in their operation rather than other-replacingconsider integration and the complexity of the system.