Cities increasingly utilise digital technologies to tackle climate risks and urban shocks, yet their real impact on resilience remains uncertain. This paper systematically reviews 115 peer-reviewed studies (2012–2024) to explore how smart city technologies engage with planning instruments, governance arrangements, and social processes, following PRISMA 2020 and combining bibliometric co-occurrence mapping with a qualitative synthesis of full texts. Three themes organise the findings: (i) urban planning and design, (ii) smart technologies in resilience, and (iii) strategic planning and policy integration. Across these themes, Internet of Things (IoT) and geographic information system (GIS) applications have the strongest empirical support for enhancing absorptive and adaptive capacities through risk mapping, early warning systems, and infrastructure operations, while artificial intelligence, digital twins, and blockchain remain largely at pilot or conceptual stages. The review also highlights significant geographical and hazard biases: most cases come from high-income cities and concentrate on floods and earthquakes, while slow stresses (such as heat, housing insecurity, and inequality) and cities in the Global South are under-represented. Overall, the study promotes a “smart–resilience co-production” perspective, demonstrating that resilience improvements rely less on technology alone and more on how digital systems are integrated into governance and participatory practices.

Smart city research often emphasises technology while neglecting how governance structures and resources influence outcomes. This study compares Tier 1 (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide) and Tier 2 (Geelong, Newcastle, Hobart, Sunshine Coast) Australian cities to evaluate how urban scale, economic capacity, governance complexity, and local priorities influence smart-enabled resilience. We analysed 22 official strategy documents using a two-phase qualitative approach: profiling each city and then synthesising patterns across technological integration, community engagement, resilience objectives and funding models. Tier 1 cities leverage extensive revenues and sophisticated infrastructure to implement ambitious initiatives such as digital twins and AI-driven services, but they encounter multi-agency delays and may overlook neighbourhood needs. Tier 2 cities deploy agile, low-cost solutions—sensor-based lighting and free public Wi-Fi—that deliver swift benefits but struggle to scale without sustained support. Across the eight cases, we identified four governance archetypes and six recurring implementation barriers—data silos, funding discontinuity, skills shortages, privacy concerns, evaluation gaps, and policy changes—which collectively influence smart-enabled resilience. The results indicate that aligning smart technologies with governance tiers, fiscal capacity, and demographic contexts is essential for achieving equitable and sustainable outcomes. We recommend tier-specific funding, mandatory co-design, and intergovernmental knowledge exchange to enable smaller cities to function as innovation labs while directing metropolitan centres towards inclusive, system-wide transformation.

This study explores the integration of smart city and resilience strategies in Sydney, focusing on the relationship between technological advancements and urban resilience. By analysing strategic documents and key projects—specifically the NSW Spatial Digital Twin, Land iQ, and SIMPaCT—this research identifies important synergies and gaps in Sydney’s urban planning efforts. The findings indicate that these projects improve urban functionality through real-time data integration, predictive planning, and adaptive infrastructure. However, there are inconsistencies between strategic objectives and actual implementation, particularly concerning stakeholder inclusivity and equity considerations. The study concludes that utilising technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), along with equitable stakeholder engagement, has the potential to significantly enhance Sydney’s ability to address environmental, social, and economic challenges. These insights offer practical recommendations for policymakers and urban planners who aim to balance innovation with inclusivity in smart city development.

Australian local governments are increasingly deploying smart city technologies to manage climate-related shocks and chronic stresses, yet implementation often remains fragmented and difficult to embed in routine practice. Many initiatives stall in “pilot-forever” cycles because decision rights, equity safeguards, operational integration, and learning systems are applied inconsistently. This paper introduces the Smart Urban Resilience Framework (SURF), a phase-gated, tier-aware governance framework designed to support the institutionalisation of smart urban resilience through more transparent and evidence-based decision-making. The SURF is grounded in an integrated evidence-to-design synthesis drawing on a systematic review, a comparative analysis of Tier 1 and Tier 2 Australian local government strategies, an in-depth Sydney case study, and stakeholder interviews. Although empirically grounded in Australian local government, the SURF is designed as a governance architecture that may be adapted in comparable municipal settings elsewhere. The framework comprises a staged pathway, two evidence gates, and four concurrent action tracks, supported by enabling layers and traceable evidence tools. The SURF is presented as a practical implementation architecture intended to support more transparent and defensible decisions about funding, scaling, refining, or retiring smart resilience initiatives. In this paper, resilience is operationalised through a service continuity lens, focusing on how digital initiatives can be embedded in governance and delivery systems to support the continuity of essential local government services under stress.