Critical Perspectives on Smart City Urbanism and Digital Governance Ambitions in Nigeria: Evidence from Lagos and Abuja

Smart city discourse and digital governance ambitions are rapidly expanding in Nigeria's urban policy landscape, with Lagos in the South West and Abuja in the North Central geopolitical zones positioned as flagship sites of smart urbanism, yet the adoption of these frameworks raises fundamental critical geographic questions about whose smartness is being served, what urban problems are being addressed, and how digital governance reconfigures power relationships between citizens and urban authorities. This study develops a critical geography of smart city urbanism in Nigeria, empirically examining smart city initiatives in Lagos and Abuja to analyse their techno-political logics, governance effects, and distributional implications. The theoretical framework draws on critical smart city studies, platform urbanism theory, surveillance capitalism scholarship, and postcolonial technology studies to construct a critical analytical lens exposing the political and power-laden dimensions of digital urban governance. Mixed methods research combines systematic analysis of smart city policy documents, procurement records, and technology vendor contracts; interviews with 82 urban technology executives, government officials, civil society actors, and urban planning academics; and ethnographic research in Lagos and Abuja examining how smart city technologies operate in practice. Digital inequality analysis using ward-level data on mobile broadband access, smartphone penetration, and digital literacy assesses the distributional preconditions for smart city participation. Results demonstrate that Lagos and Abuja's smart city programmes are driven by surveillance and revenue extraction imperatives more than service delivery improvement, systematically excluding low-income and informal communities from smart governance benefits while increasing their exposure to digitalised enforcement. The study makes original theoretical contributions to African critical smart city geography and digital governance scholarship. Keywords: smart city, digital governance, critical geography, Lagos, North Central Nigeria.