From Infrastructure to Digital Skills: A PRISMA Systematic Review of Digital Capability in Smart City Transformation

ABSTRACT

Smart city research has largely focused on infrastructure, digital systems and technological performance, while giving less attention to the human and organisational conditions that make urban transformation feasible and durable in practice. This study examines how digital capability shapes smart city transformation beyond infrastructure‐led perspectives. A PRISMA‐based systematic review was conducted using Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection to identify studies linking smart city or urban digital transformation to human capital, workforce capability, organisational capability and governance capacity. The review indicates that transformation outcomes are not sufficiently explained by infrastructure alone. Digital skills, workforce readiness and training emerged as important foundations of change, but their influence depended strongly on organisational support, leadership capacity, internal coordination and governance arrangements that enable digital initiatives to be embedded, maintained and scaled. The findings suggest that smart city transformation is better understood as a multi‐level capability process in which individual, organisational and governance capabilities interact rather than operate independently. The synthesis also indicates that technologically ambitious urban strategies often generate uneven results when capability development remains fragmented or weakly institutionalised. On this basis, the review supports a capability‐based interpretation of smart city transformation that shifts attention from technology as an end in itself to the conditions that sustain its effective and inclusive use. The study contributes to a more human‐centred and institutionally grounded understanding of smart city transformation and highlights capability alignment as a key condition for resilient and sustainable urban change.