The main theme of ICSCI 2026, “Smart Governance and Technology-Driven Urban Transformation for Sustainable and Resilient Cities,” emphasizes the integration of governance frameworks, technological innovation, and sustainability principles in shaping future urban environments.
Abstract
Across different historical periods, urban transformation has consistently been driven by three fundamental forces: capital accumulation, ideological shifts, and technological advancement. The smart city paradigm is situated within this third domain, where information technology and digital infrastructures act as key drivers of development. However, this technological emphasis also raises critical concerns. The pursuit of efficiency may risk marginalizing human interests, blurring the boundaries between technological systems and social realities. Therefore, a central challenge in smart city development lies in balancing technological innovation with democratic governance, ensuring that citizens remain at the heart of urban transformation processes. In response to these challenges and opportunities, SMART CITY Universitas Indonesia proudly presents The 6th International Conference on Smart City Innovations (ICSCI) 2026. This conference serves as a platform for the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and experiences among academics, researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners. It aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and to generate practical solutions addressing pressing urban issues, including smart cities, urban mobility, resilient infrastructure, and sustainability. Through this initiative, Universitas Indonesia reaffirms its commitment to contributing actively to global research networks and advancing impactful, solution-oriented scholarship. Building on the success of previous ICSCI conferences held in Bandung (2018), Semarang (2019), Jakarta (2020), Bali (2023), and Jakarta (2025), the 6th ICSCI will be held on 11–12 May 2026 at Grand Mercure Kemayoran Jakarta, Indonesia. Organized by SMART CITY Universitas Indonesia in support of the Research for Global Impact Universitas Indonesia 2025 Program, the conference provides an international forum for presenting and disseminating cutting-edge research and innovative practices. The event features distinguished keynote speakers, invited experts, and participants from diverse sectors, including academia, government, and industry. The main theme of ICSCI 2026, “Smart Governance and Technology-Driven Urban Transformation for Sustainable and Resilient Cities,” emphasizes the integration of governance frameworks, technological innovation, and sustainability principles in shaping future urban environments. This theme is further elaborated through several sub-themes, including social innovation and data-driven policy for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), urban transformation toward smart and inclusive cities, strengthening urban resilience, and the role of smart governance in sustainable urban planning. List of Organizing Committee of the 6th ICSCI 2026 is available in this PDF.
Cities worldwide continue to experiment with urban technology solutions to address urban problems. Smart city projects have recently emerged in North America, including Canada, but their governance implications on cities and communities remains not fully understood. This article is based on a post-hoc analysis of a pan-Canadian government-driven technology and innovation competition called the Smart Cities Challenge (SCC). The research explored the impact of the SCC across three areas: (1) municipal innovation and governance, (2) collaboration among public, private, and community networks, and (3) policy implementation within local government structures. The findings indicate that public smart city competitions do succeed in fostering strategic planning and community engagement in municipal governments, however local governments struggle to advance technology-oriented projects to the implementation stage without greater investment. For those that did, sustaining successes without further investment and capacity building. The study’s key contribution lies in revealing how the competition stimulated new governance processes, strategic planning efforts, and collaborative networks, while also exposing significant implementation challenges rooted in fiscal constraints, limited technical capacity, and the short-lived nature of competition-based incentives. The research highlights the promise and limits of government-led smart city competitions as tools for advancing municipal innovation in today’s constrained fiscal context.
Jeffrey Biggar, Austin Zwick, Zachary Spicer· Local Economy· 0 citations
Smart city innovation has emerged as a strategic concept in urban governance to improve the quality of life, requiring collaboration among diverse stakeholders. This study examines smart city development from a stakeholder perspective, focusing on Malang City, Indonesia. A qualitative approach was employed, including in-depth interviews, policy document analysis, and field observations, guided by stakeholder theory to understand how various actors influence policy and implementation. The findings indicate that Malang has implemented several smart initiatives, including e-government services, digital infrastructure, traffic management, and environmental monitoring. These efforts are generally perceived to enhance efficiency and transparency. However, challenges persist, particularly in ensuring inclusivity, strengthening inter-agency coordination, and improving digital literacy. The local government plays a leading role, while the private sector, academia, and civil society contribute technical expertise and community engagement. Overall, smart city innovation in Malang is progressing but remains in its early stages and requires stronger collaboration, institutional capacity, and accountability. This study underscores the importance of stakeholders as supporting actors in advancing collaborative and inclusive smart city governance.
Ali Roziqin, Rio Aji Prasetyo, Rifki Muhammad Bintang et al.· Sustainability· 1 citation
Smart urban governance has moved from a technology-centred agenda toward a public-value, sustainability-oriented and people-centred model of urban transformation. This paper examines international experience in managing smart cities for sustainable development and derives policy lessons for Viet Nam. Using a qualitative comparative policy analysis, the study reviews academic literature, international standards, global reports and selected city cases, including Singapore, Seoul, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen and Curitiba. The findings show that effective smart urban governance depends less on isolated technologies than on integrated institutions, interoperable data infrastructure, measurable sustainability outcomes, citizen participation, resilient finance and safeguards for privacy and inclusion. International experience also indicates that smart-city programmes fail when they are reduced to fragmented pilot projects, vendor-driven platforms or surveillance-heavy urban dashboards. For Viet Nam, where national strategies on sustainable smart cities, digital transformation, green growth and urban development already provide a policy foundation, the central challenge is implementation coherence. The paper proposes a transition from project-based smart-city deployment to mission-oriented urban governance anchored in national standards, local accountability, open data, climate resilience, inclusive service design and diversified urban finance.
Huynh Vinh Khanh· International Journal of Adv...· 0 citations
This exploratory research study examines the transformative trajectory of digital governance frameworks within India's Smart City Mission (SCM), elucidating the multifaceted challenges and latent opportunities inherent in technology-mediated urban administration. Drawing upon secondary data from fifteen acknowledged scholarly publications, this study employs a systematic literature synthesis methodology to comprehend the nexus between e-governance frameworks and sustainable urban development paradigms. The study reveals that while digital governance initiatives have catalyzed citizen-centric service delivery, participatory decisionmaking mechanisms, and resource optimization strategies, formidable impediments persist in the domains of digital infrastructure deficiencies, inter-agency coordination lacunae, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and socio-digital divides. The findings underscore the imperative for comprehensive policy recalibration, technological capacity augmentation, and inclusive stakeholder engagement to actualize the transformative potential of digital governance in Indian urban landscape. This pivotal study contributes to the burgeoning discourse on technoadministrative convergence and proffers pragmatic recommendations for ameliorating implementation efficacy within smart city ecosystems.
Rubaya Akther, K. Lakshman, Sumaya Jan· International journal of soc...· 0 citations
This study investigates the conceptual and practical interlinkages among four major urban paradigms—smart cities, sustainable cities, livable cities, and X-minute cities—using bibliometric co-occurrence and citation analyses. A total of 1439 peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus (1979–2024) were examined to map the thematic overlaps and emerging clusters among these city concepts. The findings reveal that smart cities constitute the most interconnected paradigm, appearing in 980 publications and functioning as a technological bridge to sustainability, livability, and proximity-based planning. The smart–sustainable city nexus, evidenced by 530 shared publications, dominates the literature. By contrast, livable cities and X-minute cities represent emerging, human-centered niches with significant growth potential. The findings offer a conceptual framework for integrated urban planning and policy, demonstrating how these paradigms collectively address the complexities of contemporary urbanization. Rather than adopting singular models, urban leaders are encouraged to formulate hybrid planning agendas that reflect local needs while aligning with global urban sustainability objectives. This study calls for a comprehensive understanding of urban development paradigms.
Hafsa Al Balushi, C. Alalouch, Aliya Al-Hashim et al.· Land· 0 citations
Contemporary cities stand at the crossroads of structural challenges - climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequalities, and resource crises - which make it urgent to overcome the urban development models inherited from the twentieth century. This contribution analyses two emerging paradigms of urban transformation - the Circular City and the 15-Minute City - identifying their convergences and the cultural, institutional, and evaluative conditions necessary for their implementation. The two models share a common relational matrix: the quality and density of relationships among actors, functions, spatial scales, and generations constitute the structuring variable of long-term urban sustainability. Circularity itself is reinterpreted as the interaction of three mutually reinforcing dimensions - temporal, spatial, and social/relational. The 15-Minute City can be interpreted as the spatial and operational translation of the Circular City at the neighbourhood scale, transforming proximity from a theoretical principle into a physically “measurable” and operational condition. A cross-cutting dimension shared by both models, yet systematically underestimated by traditional planning, is the intergenerational one: urban decisions produce effects unfolding over decades, shaping the wellbeing opportunities of generations that still have no voice in decision-making processes. The paper develops a comparative analysis of the main international wellbeing evaluation frameworks, identifying significant convergences and unresolved critical issues. Building upon the observations from the comparative analysis, the contribution introduces a conceptual framework that proposes a structure to support the development of hybrid intergenerational evaluation tools for assessing urban transformations, that is to identify the key dimensions that future context-specific evaluation approaches may consider. It is organized around two domains - quality of living in the present and transferable intergenerational capitals - crossed by two transversal dimensions in a hierarchical relationship: culture as a foundational condition and governance as an enabling mechanism. Future research will focus on identifying context-sensitive indicator sets, testing alternative weighting approaches, and empirically validating the framework through urban case studies.
L. Fusco Girard, Francesca Nocca· Journal of Circular Economy· 0 citations