Government Approaches to Requirements Gathering in Smart Cities: Lessons Learned for Southeast Asia

Smart city is frequently regarded as an effective approach that leverages technological solutions to address urban challenges. Due to the complex nature of smart city projects, requirements engineering plays a crucial role in providing a structured method to gather, analyze, and manage the requirements of various stakeholders. This ensures that technological solutions are properly aligned with urban development goals. However, it is important to note that most of the current requirements engineering (RE) theories originate from the Global North. Given the significant socio-cultural differences between the Global North and the Global South, it is essential to investigate the existing policies regarding requirements engineering in smart city projects in both regions. This will help to understand how these techniques are adapted or need to be tailored to suit the unique contexts of each region. This study aims to explore the government's perspective on requirements engineering in the Global South compared to those in high-ranked smart cities from the Global North. Considering the diverse cultural backgrounds in the Global South countries, we select Southeast Asia cities in the 2024 IMD Smart Cities Index as case studies. We conducted comprehensive reviews of government policy documents and smart city websites from 23 cities in 20 countries; 15 cities from the Global North and 8 cities from Southeast Asia. The policy documents and official websites were selected to represent the official government stance on requirements engineering. We observed that each city has different perspectives and employs various requirements-gathering techniques for smart city projects. Based on the result, we propose community-based requirements engineering for smart cities in Southeast Asia countries.