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The accelerating digital transformation of urban economies is reshaping labor markets at unprecedented speed, generating skills mismatches, employment volatility, and widening inclusion gaps that current smart city governance frameworks are insufficiently equipped to address. While the smart city literature has advanced substantially in the areas of digital infrastructure, mobility, and e-government services, the governance of labor market transitions in data-driven urban environments remains conceptually underdeveloped. In particular, no integrated analytical framework currently links smart city governance, labor market intelligence, and workforce resilience into a coherent tool for assessing urban preparedness for technology-driven employment change. This study addresses that gap by developing the Urban Workforce Readiness Framework (UWRF)—an integrated conceptual model designed to evaluate how prepared urban labor markets are for accelerating digital and technological transformation. Methodologically, the framework is constructed through a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed scholarship published between 2015 and 2025 across five domains—smart city governance, labor market regulation, human capital development, workforce resilience, and data-driven public administration—complemented by a thematic review of policy documents issued by the OECD, ILO, European Commission, and World Bank. On this basis, the UWRF identifies five interdependent dimensions of urban workforce readiness: (i) digital infrastructure capacity, (ii) labor market intelligence and analytics, (iii) workforce skills adaptability, (iv) institutional governance capacity, and (v) social inclusion mechanisms. A multi-criteria operationalization is proposed, enabling comparative diagnostic assessment across cities and supporting evidence-based prioritization of policy interventions. The analysis demonstrates that institutional governance capacity and real-time labor market intelligence function as critical mediators within the system: in their absence, even substantial investments in digital infrastructure fail to produce resilient, inclusive, or sustainable labor market outcomes. Theoretically, the study extends data-driven governance scholarship beyond service delivery into the domain of workforce management, thereby integrating three traditionally separate research streams—smart city studies, labor market governance, and digital public administration—under a single analytical architecture. Practically, the UWRF provides policymakers, municipal authorities, labor market institutions, and urban planners with a structured diagnostic instrument for aligning digital transformation strategies with sustainable and equitable employment outcomes, and offers a replicable foundation for future empirical validation across diverse urban contexts.
Mkhitaryan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.