ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Cities
Sec. Smart Technologies and Cities
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsc.2025.1592534
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Approaches to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development in the Global SouthView all 3 articles
Toward Sustainable Social Change: Strategic Approaches to Smart City Development in Developing Nations
Provisionally accepted
- 1Indian Institute of Management Kashipur, Kashipur, India
- 2Department of Management Studies, Graphic Era University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India
- 3Management Development Institute, Sukhrali, Haryana, India
- 4Taylor's University, Subang Jaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
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Planning, governing processes and making decision are crucial elements for any societal change and the urban circular economy. The fight for urban resources, environmental sustainability, maintaining urban ecosystem, circular economy and fulfilling public service demands have made the existing governments on pressure to increase its efficiency and collaborative abilities to work in a smarter way. This study aims to explore various enablers to improve the city administration for the smart cities. The factors are identified from literature. The study deployed the DEMATEL approach. The experts have been consulted for finalization of factors and establishing the causal relationships using the DEMATEL technique to study cross inter-relationship among factors. The findings suggest the rankings of factors and classify them into cause-and-effect groups. The study finds influencing enablers which improve policies implementation, e-services, transparency, monitoring, and control abilities for smart city administration. The development of smart cities facilitates an established, interconnected, and sustainable urban system for circular economy. The policymakers, officials, service providers and urban planners would get benefited from the outcomes to plan the right initiatives for improvements in governance structure for the development of the smart cities. Although there has been a widespread literature on factors for improving governance, but cause and effect relationships have not been explored. This study proposes a strategic framework for smart city governance and sustainable social change.
Keywords: Smart administration, City governance, Smart city, urban societies, DEMATEL, Circular economy
Received: 12 Mar 2025; Accepted: 22 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kumar, Gupta, Singh and Sayal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anu Sayal, Taylor's University, Subang Jaya, 47500, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
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