Smart and Sustainable Traditional African Cities: A Critical Review of Geospatial Approaches to Urban Transformation

African cities are experiencing rapid and often unregulated urban growth, intensifying infrastructural deficits, environmental degradation, and governance challenges, particularly within traditional and informal urban systems. Although smart-city and sustainable-urban development frameworks have gained global prominence, their direct transfer to African contexts remains problematic because of socio-cultural, institutional, and spatial specificities that differ markedly from the Western and Asian settings in which most of these frameworks were conceived. This paper provides a critical review of the conceptual foundations, theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and geospatial applications underpinning smart and sustainable urban development in traditional African cities. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary literature, the review synthesizes dominant research trends and identifies persistent gaps relating to contextual adaptability, citizen participation, data governance, and informal urban dynamics. It argues that geospatially enabled, context-sensitive, and community-centred frameworks are needed to support inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban transformation across the continent, and it proposes a research agenda to close the identified gaps.