Cities across the Global South are racing to adopt smart infrastructure. Sensors on streetlights, dashboards tracking traffic flow, digital portals for public services — the language of innovation is everywhere. But behind these investments lies an uncomfortable question that too few policymakers are willing to confront: who actually benefits?
The Promise and the Reality
The promise of smart cities is seductive. Data-driven governance should, in theory, make urban life more efficient, more transparent, and more responsive to citizens' needs. When a city installs air quality monitors, residents get real-time information about their environment. When public transport runs on optimised algorithms, commuters save time. When municipal services go digital, corruption should decrease.
But theory and reality diverge sharply when you examine who has access to these systems and who does not. In most cities of the Global South, the communities with the least access to digital infrastructure are precisely those most in need of better governance: informal settlements, peri-urban zones, low-income neighbourhoods, and rural-to-urban migrants.
Data Systems That Cannot See Everyone
The most troubling dimension of smart city failures is not the technology itself — it is what happens when entire populations become invisible in the data. If a neighbourhood lacks formal addresses, its residents do not appear in planning databases. If a community does not use digital payment platforms, their economic activity goes unrecorded. If households lack smartphones, they cannot participate in civic engagement apps.
This invisibility is not passive neglect. It is structural exclusion. The data systems that cities build to serve their populations end up reflecting and reinforcing existing patterns of marginalisation. The people who most need better services are the ones most likely to be absent from the datasets that drive service allocation.
When urban data platforms are designed without equity at their core, they risk turning temporary digital divides into permanent institutional exclusions.
Lessons from Bangladesh
My own research in Bangladesh illustrates this tension at multiple levels. Studying digital financial services in marginalised Haor communities, I found that while technology can demonstrably reduce poverty for those who can access it, the gap between connected and unconnected populations widens simultaneously. The communities that benefit are those already close enough to infrastructure, literacy, and institutional support to take advantage of digital tools. Those further away fall further behind.
Similarly, leading digital literacy workshops in Sylhet city and Moulvibazar as part of the SUST Career Club revealed a contrast that no dashboard can capture. Urban participants engaged readily with digital tools. In Moulvibazar — a remote area of Sylhet Division — participants struggled with absent internet connectivity, low digital literacy, and a deep, culturally rooted distrust of digital platforms. These are not problems that a faster broadband connection alone can solve.
What Would Equitable Smart Cities Look Like?
Genuine equity in smart city development requires rethinking the entire design process, not adding inclusion as an afterthought. This means:
- Starting with participatory governance models that centre the voices of marginalised communities before any technology is deployed
- Designing data systems for representativeness, actively seeking to include populations that conventional data collection methods miss
- Establishing clear data stewardship frameworks that specify who owns urban data, who can access it, and how privacy is protected
- Building digital literacy and trust alongside infrastructure, recognising that technology adoption is a social process, not merely a technical one
- Measuring success not by the quantity of sensors deployed but by whether the most vulnerable residents experience tangible improvements in their daily lives
The Path Forward
Post-industrial cities in Europe have been grappling with these questions longer than most, and their experiences — both successes and failures — offer valuable lessons for cities in the Global South. Programmes like RePIC's Track 3 on Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Cities exist precisely because the intersection of data, governance, sustainability, and community engagement is where the hardest and most important urban work happens.
The question is not whether cities should become smarter. It is whether they can become smarter in ways that serve everyone — or whether smart infrastructure will simply become another layer of advantage for those who already have the most. The answer depends not on technology, but on political will, institutional design, and the voices we choose to listen to when making decisions about urban futures.
The cities that get this right will not be the ones with the most impressive dashboards. They will be the ones where a resident of the poorest neighbourhood can see their community reflected in the data — and can see that data being used to make their life meaningfully better.