Kuala Lampur, July 9 -- For the past decade, we've been sold a seductive vision: the "smart city." Gleaming control rooms, traffic lights that talk to each other, trash cans that tweet when they're full, and a seamless digital utopia managed by benevolent algorithms. The narrative has been overwhelmingly technocentric-as if the city were a sluggish operating system merely awaiting a software patch.

But a new systematic literature review by Yuxi Dai, Sandra Hasanefendic, and Bart Bossink delivers a much-needed bucket of cold water. After sifting through the evidence on the smart city transformation process, their findings point to an inconvenient truth: technology is not the lead actor. It's a supporting prop. The real drama-and the real ...