The smart city has been a popular planning concept since the early 2000s, and promise city governments investments to support more efficient urban service provision – and sometimes a technological panacea for urban ills and future problems.

While new technologies do provide tools that can help improve people’s quality of life and optimise resource use in some aspects, there are very real pitfalls with unquestioningly adopting “smart city” as a governance approach. Through a literature scan undertaken for an elective planning class, I tried to unpack how smart city policies could support ethical, equitable planning.

I argue that smart cities approaches that adopt an efficiency lens and see the smart city primarily as infrastructure or a platform risk sidelining citizens from decision-making points in planning, and relegate them to the passive roles of customers or recipients. Without real engagement, planners will not be able to acquire the planning wisdom that helps to make good plans.

For smart city policies to contribute to good planning, they should move away from a platform mindset and support co-creation with citizens throughout the planning process, recognise the role and wisdom of interstitial actors such as community organisations and civil society groups, and plan for transparency and accountability.