How do African cities benefit from using smart technologies? Perspectives from Local Government Practitioners.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has immensely challenged cities across the world to review and recalibrate their strategies and systems of interfacing with their stakeholders. However, the problem is that the benefits of smart cities interventions are not well documented for African cities. This paper is interested in succinctly documenting these. This goal was achieved through a desktop literature review, as well as through empirically gathering and analyzing views of local government practitioners on the implementation of the smart city concept. In this regard, a case study of the City of Tshwane, the Capital City of South Africa, was used. The study found that the CTMM is deriving benefits from the use of smart city technologies across the dimensions of social, economic, environmental, and governance. However, the benefits are not evenly distributed among the four dimensions. The CTMM seem to be deriving more governance and economic benefits from the use of smart cities and digital technologies, compared to the social benefits. However, these findings may need to be interpreted within the context of financial and governance challenges faced by the City of Tshwane in the past 5 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]