Developing Executive Academic Programs to Support Smart City Governance and Planning

Abstract

Cities are investing heavily in data platforms, sensing infrastructure, and algorithmic tools, yet the officials who must govern these systems are rarely educated for the task. This article addresses how universities should design executive academic programs that build the governance and planning capabilities smart city transformation actually requires. It proceeds as an integrative review of two literatures that have developed in isolation: research on smart city governance, which documents the competencies and organisational capacities cities lack, and research on executive education for the public sector, which documents how experienced professionals learn. From the first literature the article derives five competency domains: socio-technical governance literacy, data governance and ethics, technology appraisal for planning, collaborative innovation, and organisational transformation. From the second it derives four design principles: problem-anchored action learning, cohort composition as curriculum, co-production with employing governments, and multi-level evaluation of effects. These elements are integrated into a program design framework that maps competency domains onto curricular structures and connects program outcomes to the organisational capacities documented in the smart city literature. The framework's central claim is that executive programs succeed when the city itself becomes the learning environment, with live governance problems serving as the primary curricular material. The article states the framework's conceptual status plainly, identifies evaluation of program effects at the organisational level as the weakest link in the evidence, and sets an agenda for empirical testing in diverse institutional contexts.