Track: Master Thesis Competition

Abstract

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.
Keywords
Smart cities, social justice, Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), Fourth Industrial Revolution (4rth
IR), Internet of Things (IoT).