Smart cities promise to generate economic, social and environmental value through the seamless connection of urban services and infrastructure by digital technologies (Hollands 2008; Viitanen and Kingston 2014), but there is scant evidence concerning their ability to enhance social wellbeing, build just and equitable communities, reduce resource consumption and waste generation, improve environmental quality or lower carbon emissions (Cavada, Hunt, and Rogers 2016). This special issue addresses the gap between the pipedream and the practice of smart cities, focusing on the social and environmental dimensions of real smart city initiatives, and the possibilities that they hold for creating more equitable and progressive cities. We argue that social equity and environmental sustainability are neither a-priori absent nor de-facto present in technological designs of smart city initiatives, but have to be made, nurtured and maintained as they materialise in particular places. This is the 'possibility' alluded to in our title, and where the focus of the Special Issue on the gap between the pipedreams and practicalities of smart cities leads. In this introduction we unpack our argument in greater detail and situate our six contributions within it. Smart cities promise nothing less than an urban utopia for the twenty-first century (Datta 2015). Stoked by estimates of a global smart city market worth up to $1.56 trillion by 2020 (Frost & Sullivan 2014), the concept has risen rapidly to prominence within industry, political and municipal discourses of urban development (Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser 2014). In 2015, de Jong and colleagues predicted that the smart city was 'on its way to become [the] leading driver of urban sustainability and regeneration initiatives' (12). In the European Union, digital innovations now underpin the majority of urban sustainability funding, with the creation of smart cities commonly positioned as a vehicle to deliver urban sustainability and economic growth (European Parliament 2014). Across Africa, South Asia, North America and the Far East, national governments, municipalities and private companies are allocating considerable resources to develop digital innovations which they claim will promote a vibrant entrepreneurship culture in cities, advance more equitable and just community development through increased citizen participation, and solve a range of sustainability issues such as climate change. The smart city pipedream diverges from other urban utopias in three quite distinctive ways. First, smart cities occupy mainstream policy and thinking, unlike the utopian settlements of the nineteenth century that were by definition counter cultural and limited to progressive colonial movements and the model villages of industrial philanthropists. Second, the smart city utopia reflects a close union between national government and private industry. The Corbuserian dream of towers in the countryside that inspired much postwar building in both the East and West in the twentieth century was driv...