The idea 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 customization of services to tailor people’s individual needs, desires, and trajectories bring the promise of combined efficiency, integration, transparency, inclusiveness, and participation.

Consequently, 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 the dichotomist expression of “hard” and “soft” approaches to the smart city (e.g., [1,2]), where “hard” refers to ICT-centered applications and physical infrastructures such as buildings, energy grids, natural resources, water and waste management, mobility, and logistics, while “soft” points to innovations, education, culture, social inclusion, and governance. This discursive dichotomy of “hard” and “soft” may also appear in other forms such as “technical” or “social” or as part of an integrated approach [3].

The binary of the 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 “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 that the “soft” approach dominates. The smart city has quickly developed a dialogue with longer-standing principles of sustainable cities [8]. This leads to a broader and varied engagement with smart cities, now involving the notions of multiple stakeholders, participation, citizens, and other soft/social aspects [9]. Letaifa [10], for example, discusses the importance of approaching smart cities as complex innovation ecosystems with integrated socioeconomic, ecological, and political sub-systems while adopting a sustainability approach.

Nevertheless, political tensions between the hard and soft pathways to the smart city remain. 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. Many authors are cautious about imbalances when the smart city agenda is dominated by digital technology. They question whether so-called smart solutions are all about a technological push driven by high-tech corporations (e.g., [11,12,13,14]). This brings forth the entrepreneurial stimulation of smart development by the ICT industries and markets associated with their products and services [15,16].

Many authors have similarly questioned the extent of inclusiveness of smart interventions regardless of their capacity to boost sustainability and spur economic growth in cities. Some call the smart city a “hollow signifier” built upon elitist control that only renders further exclusions and injustices, triggering commodification amid a weak economy [19,20]. This perspective considers smart city solutions as neoliberal “techno-environmental fixes” that involve the depoliticization of city governance and the outsourcing of public services to money-grabbing initiatives by technology funders, utility, and ICT companies [14,17,21].