Understanding urban energy policies as transition pathways toward sustainable and smart cities

The transition of urban energy systems toward sustainability and smartness depends on effective policy design. Despite significant scholarly attention, research remains fragmented across policy instruments, system components, and analytical perspectives. To address these limitations, this study presents an integrated framework that combines a PRISMA-guided systematic review, artificial intelligence-assisted topic modeling (BERTopic), and Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) transition theory. This approach is applied to a corpus of 266 peer-reviewed articles (2021–2025) to extract specific mechanisms and explicitly map four policy instruments investments, regulations, incentives, and awareness across a standardized seven-sector urban system model. The synthesis indicates that broad mixed-instrument policy discourse accounts for the largest topic-level share of the corpus, while targeted capital investments emerge as the most prevalent distinct, instrument-specific mechanism; policy attention is concentrated primarily on energy supply, networks, and demand. The MLP framework further conceptualizes identified barriers as regime inertia and motivations as landscape pressures. Within this framework, policy instruments function as dynamic transition pathways: regulations reshape institutional norms to drive transformation; investments enable infrastructure reconfiguration and technological substitution; incentives foster niche expansion by reducing adoption risks; and awareness campaigns enhance cognitive legitimacy. The analysis also reveals path-dependent temporal sequencing, such as Transformation preceding Substitution, illustrating how initial regulatory changes establish the structural conditions required for subsequent infrastructure replacement. This study ultimately offers a theoretically grounded and empirically structured taxonomy, underscoring that effective transitions depend on sequentially integrated policy mixes rather than isolated interventions.