Smart City and Smart Government: Synonymous or Complementary?

Smart City is an emerging and multidisciplinary domain. It has been recently defined as innovation, not necessarily but mainly through information and communications technologies (ICT), which enhance urban life in terms of people, living, economy, mobility and governance. Smart government is also an emerging topic, which attracts increasing attention from scholars who work in public administration, political and information sciences. There is no widely accepted definition for smart government, but it appears to be the next step of e-government with the use of technology and innovation by governments for better performance. However, it is not clear whether these two terms coexist or concern different domains. The aim of this paper is to investigate the term smart government and to clarify its meaning in relationship to the smart city. In this respect this paper performed a comprehensive literature review analysis and concluded that smart government is shown not to be synonymous with smart city. Our findings show that smart city has a dimension of smart government, and smart government uses smart city as an area of practice. The authors conclude that smart city is complimentary, part of larger smart government movement.