Begüm Özkaynak ^1* Necati Aras ² Can A. Yucesoy ³ Irem Daloglu Cetinkaya ⁴ Cem Ersoy ⁵ Özlem Durmaz Ince ⁶ Mutlu Koca ⁷ İrem Nalça ³ Turgut Onay ⁸ Sinan Öncü ⁹ Berihan Ülger Vatansever ⁴ Eda Yücesoy ¹⁰

• ¹ Department of Economics, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ² Department of Industrial Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ³ Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Çengelköy, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ⁴ The Institute of Environmental Sciences, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ⁵ Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ⁶ Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Bebek, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ⁷ Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Bebek, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ⁸ Institute of Environmental Sciences, Boğaziçi University, Bebek, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ⁹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Bebek, Istanbul, Türkiye
• ¹⁰ Department of City and Regional Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University, Maslak, Istanbul, Türkiye

Smart city development is a complex, transdisciplinary challenge that requires adaptive resource use and contextaware decision-making practices to enhance human functionality and capabilities while respecting societal and environmental rights, and ethics. There is an urgent need for action in cities, particularly to (i) enhance the health and well-being of urban residents while ensuring inclusivity in urban development (e.g., through the intelligent design of public spaces, mobility, and transportation) and (ii) improve resilience and sustainability (e.g., through better disaster management, planning of city logistics, and waste management). This paper aims to explore how neuroscientific and neurotechnological solutions can contribute to the development of smart cities, as experts in various fields underline that real-time sensing designs and control algorithms inspired by the brain could help build and plan urban systems that are healthy, safe, inclusive, and resilient. Motivated by the potential interplay between societal challenges and these emerging technologies, we provide an overview of state-of-the-art research through a bibliometric analysis of neurochallenges within the context of smart cities using terms and data extracted from the Scopus database between 2018 and 2022. The results indicate that smart city research is stillremains fragmented and technology-driven, relying heavily on internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies, often lacking. Mostly, it also lacks careful integration and adoption tailored to societal goals and human-centric concerns. In this context, the paper also explores key research streams and discusses how to create new synergies and complementarities in the challenge-technology intersection. We conclude that realizing the vision of smart cities at the nexus of neuroscience, technology, urban space, and society requires more than just technological progress. Integrating the human dimension alongside various technological tools and systems is crucial. This necessitates better interdisciplinary collaboration and co-production of knowledge towards a hybrid intelligence, where synergies of education and research, technological innovation, and societal innovation are genuinely built. We hope the insights from this analysis will help orient neurotechnological interventions on urban living and ensure they are more responsive to societal and environmental challenges as well as to legal and ethical concerns.